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Today I discovered didactic text on base twelve that I had not noticed before in an old school mathematics textbook. A facsimile of one such page is shown in the following image:
Facsimile of Page 36, New Intermediate Mathematics
The text mentions the greater likelihood of base twelve replacing decimal, extant use of base twelve in real practical spatial measurement computations, the ordinary English words dozen and gross for powers of twelve, some benefits of base twelve, that the extra numerals for ten and eleven "are usually written T and E", and examples of numbers in base twelve. The annotation scheme is the full word "twelve" written below and to the right of the number.
The page is among two dozen other pages on the topic of different bases and exercises on converting between them. The foreword has the year 1966. None of this material is on the school curriculum anymore, and I never encountered it myself when in school. It was quite surprising for me to see it as I had not even known about it being prescribed before. It was evidently more relevant before decimalisation when Imperial units of measure of feet and inches and monetary values of shillings and pence were still being used.
The example of the number that looks like the word TOE demonstrates the clumsiness of using letters to represent numerals.
References
Facsimile of Page 36, New Intermediate Mathematics
The text mentions the greater likelihood of base twelve replacing decimal, extant use of base twelve in real practical spatial measurement computations, the ordinary English words dozen and gross for powers of twelve, some benefits of base twelve, that the extra numerals for ten and eleven "are usually written T and E", and examples of numbers in base twelve. The annotation scheme is the full word "twelve" written below and to the right of the number.
The page is among two dozen other pages on the topic of different bases and exercises on converting between them. The foreword has the year 1966. None of this material is on the school curriculum anymore, and I never encountered it myself when in school. It was quite surprising for me to see it as I had not even known about it being prescribed before. It was evidently more relevant before decimalisation when Imperial units of measure of feet and inches and monetary values of shillings and pence were still being used.
The example of the number that looks like the word TOE demonstrates the clumsiness of using letters to represent numerals.
References
- New Intermediate Mathematics; by E. Gibson, T. K. Crohan; 1966; Section One, Systems of Numeration, page ③⓪⁏
» Dozenal Number Words from Metric Prefixes
» Dozenalizing Metric
» Myon Dozenal Nomenclature
» Information per Area of Numerical Forms
» Denominational Dozenal Numerals
» Proto-Indo-European Numbers
» Radix Economy for Alternating Bases
» Graduation Subdivisions