Numbers and numerals have been around for the past 10,000 years, societies have depended on number systems for general day to day life just like we do today in our society. In our number systems lecture we were given the task of considering why we have number and why we need numbers? This question seems like a slightly obvious one to me, of course we need number:

Time – work/daily routines/appointments/travel/world

Weight – baking/cooking/health/ medicine

Money – shopping/finances/banking

Angles – buildings/ interior design

Counting – estimations/ event management/ health and safety

But when we explored other societies that don’t have such a detailed number system as us, it becomes apparent that number systems and numerals are only needed if the particular society or culture use or deal with number often. An Amazon Indian Tribe who were recently interviewed had a very limited number system which only went up to  the number 4, for anything above this number they simply say many, they don’t use a specific number to state the actual amount. This is because the people in the Amazon tribe don’t rely on counting, they do little trade or calculations whereas we rely heavily on our number system therefore it is very important to understand the numerals and the way the number systems works.

Alongside this question we were given the task of creating a new numeral system, we chose to create a totally new number system which built on the foundation of a dice/dot numeral system. We came up with a base 12 number system which is different to our Arabic numeral system which only goes up to 9. We decided to call our new numeral system the ‘Decinals’