Decimal History – Aristotle and the Pythagoreans

[Sharma]

From A History of Mathematics by Carl Boyer:

“As Aristotle had noted long ago, the widespread use today of the decimal system is but the result of the anatomical accident that most of us are born with ten fingers and ten toes.”

“From the mathematical point of view it is somewhat inconvenient that Cro-Magnon man and his descendants did not have either four or six fingers on his hand.”

Though the Pythagoreans later attributed that the number ten was not based on the number of fingers and toes:

“The holiest of all was the number ten, or the tetractys, for it represented the number of the universe, including the sum of all the possible geometric dimensions. A single point is the generator of dimensions. two points determine a line of dimension one, three points (not on a line) determine a triangle with area of dimension two, and four points (not in a plane) determine a tetrahedron with volume of dimension three; the sum of the numbers representing all dimensions, therefore the number ten…the perfect number, the symbol for health and harmony.”

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