#15 With that math that is where we got the word ‘babbling’.
Teacher to student: What is 2 + 2?
Student: It is 7 no 3 no 9 no 60
The Babylonian number system was AMAZING! It was a weighted number system, like base 10, which was only introduced into Europe in the 14th Century. Prior to that most people used Roman Numerals and used pebbles (”calculi” in Latin) to calculate with. Ptolemy recommended using Babylonian numbers for astronomical calculations. We still have their legacy in the counting of time (60 minutes, 60 seconds) and the division of the circle into 360 parts. (12 hours in a day was an Egyptian innovation, based on the passage of the Decan stars.) Originally 0 was represented by an empty space, but it replaced by a dot (”.”) in later centuries.
https://archive.org/details/mathematicalcune0000neug/page/n5/mode/2up
Otto Neugebauer was an interesting individual, he left Heidelberg when the Nazis seized power and went to Yale, when Yale was still a beacon of intellectual seriousness and intellectual freedom.