Did you say 60…?
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Time passes, but an hour is divided into sixty minutes and a minute into sixty seconds. Why was this system chosen? The answer goes back to the Sumerians, peoples living along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates around 3000 BC, who invented what would become the Mesopotamian numeral system. Yet the Egyptians used base 10 and the Maya base 20. The Sumerians therefore adopted base 60, also known as the sexagesimal base. They used it to measure time and angles. We still do so today, despite several attempts throughout history to switch to divisions by 10 and 100. Curiously, even today in Basque, 40 is said (and written) as "two times 20," 60 as "three times 20," and 80 as "four times 20."
The number 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. This makes it a very handy integer for all manner of calculations, which may explain why it was originally chosen.
A little arithmetic fun with 60
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Every integer has a host of properties, some of them rather "far-fetched"—the kind often found on websites. Let's look at the most striking ones for 60.
