Hi, I'm Steve Jones and I'm going to look
at the question of who invented decimals.
Well decimals today are used virtually though
out the world. Everybody uses decimals. But
in fact it is only over the past six thousand
years that they have actually been used in
some kind of form or way. The earlier Elanites
in Persia had a system which seems to be decimal
based or some elements of it are. By the time
were in 2,900 BC in Egypt and 2,600 BC in
the Indus Valley we have systems which are
based on some kind of decimal nomenclature.
The same in China in 1,400 BC and it's not
really until we get to India just before the
transformation between BC and AD, that is
about a thousand years before Christ, do we
find in India the start of a formal decimal
system. Certainly it was written down in 400
BC and Pingala Sanskrit, there was a true
decimal system and this was the multiples
of ten written in the same way as we would
write them. Archimedes was using this system
in 250 BC. When we actually go further forward
to 100 AD, we start to see decimal logarithms.
Logarithms can not survive without some number
base system and decimal logarithms. That is
logarithms to the base ten using the decimal
system were certainly in use in the year 100
AD. So although informally decimal systems
were used throughout history, it was not really
until the last two thousand years that we've
used proper decimal numbers.
