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by Joker_vD
1864 days ago
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Which is precisely what enables the positional system at the conceptual level: not only you can have "gaps" in the middle, but it enables you to distinguish between 1 and 10 and 100. Babylonians, for example, didn't conceptualize 0 as a numeric quantity just like 1 or 5. So, when they invented a sign for gaps in the numbers, they didn't use it at the ending positions, so their "I" could mean 1, or 60, or 3600, or..., depending on the context. Neither was it used to signify the quantity of zero: empty space was used instead. |
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