Why Base 60?

         A speculation I have for the use of base 60 is its practicality in keeping track of time and understanding the world around them better. During the Babylonian times, it was probably difficult to keep track of the years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Since there are 12 months in a year, I think 60 was a good multiple of 12 to use because it could be divisible by 10 which they had a symbol for. Considering the number of seconds in a minute and minutes in an hour, the Babylonians might have used base 60 so that 60^2 = 3600 would give them the number of seconds in an hour. In addition, the number 60 is often seen in trigonometry when dealing with circles and triangles so that might have helped the Babylonians understand shapes around them. 

The number 60 is still relevant in our day-to-day lives through telling time and continues to plays a huge role in understanding the world around us today. For example, its role in sinusoidal waves and circles. Further, in my Chinese culture, turning 60 holds great value and calls for celebration. 

Through research, I learned that base 60 was useful to the Babylonians because 60 had a lot of factors (Katz, 2009). This meant that they could express numbers through fractions or parts of 60 (Katz, 2009). In fact, that was their equivalent of decimals (Katz, 2009). Computations were made easier because of its divisibility properties as well. It seems the number 60 had a large role in angles and shapes back then as well because according to O'Connor and Robertson (2000), the Sumerians valued the equilateral triangle as a building block which may have been adopted by the Babylonians (O'Connor and Robertson, 2000). 

Katz, V. J. (2009). A History of Mathematics: An Introduction (3rd ed). Addison-Wesley.

O’Connor, J. J., & Robertson, E. F. (2000). Babylonian numerals, MacTutor.