Numbers are everywhere we go but why do we have them? Time, temperature, weight, height, phone numbers and even on the front of buses. Something  I learned from this input was that in fact numbers were thought to have came about through trading a long, long time ago.

Number Systems have never crossed my mind before this recent maths input, to be honest. I have always just assumed that people everywhere stuck to the “normal” , being the European system i am used to. I was aware of Roman Numerals  from past school projects and some watch collections. However, I was not aware it was still used, as such, but now that I have looked into this,  I see that I must have been pretty narrow-minded to think that maths and numbers would be the same worldwide.

Picture from Google Images – education.scholastic.co.uk

From further research after the workshop, I realised there was far more number systems that again I had never heard of such as Hindu- Arabic, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese. Which are displayed in the chart below.

Picture from Google Images – www.earth360.com

The task in this workshop was to create our own working number system. Our group decided to use a line per number and join them up… it worked but the higher the number the longer it would take to write. So we decided to stop at 9  and put a simple dot next to our number 1 to make 10. Our number system was a success.