Talk:Maya numerals

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Did the Maya people make many mistakes between, say, 6 and 25? Sabbut 08:04, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

No. Our current illustration is perhaps not that good at showing how the place value is seperated. More usually the numbers were rotated 90 degrees from what is shown, while the place value seperation was vertical.

So, for example, using a "0" as a dot and a "I" as a bar, six would be:

Where as 25 would be:

Cheers, -- Infrogmation 15:40, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

In glyphic representation of the numbers, the shape of each glyph being roughly the same size is enough to distinguish between various levels of the vegisimal system. I believe that during calculations, they used beads in some sort of abacus. Dylanwhs 20:32, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Gnomon edits

I started to make some clean-up edits to User:Gnomon's recent additions to this page, but on consideration I am going to revert much of it. A good deal of it seems to me to be wrong. Thanks for your work here, Gnomon, but could we please have a source for some of this? For example:

"Most of what we know about Mayan numbers comes from a single document, the Dresden Codex"

What about the other pre-Columbian codicies, the stelae and other stone monuments, painting, and pottery which also use Maya numbers? They were still in use in the early colonial era, and for example Landa wrote about the numbers.

That the calendar uses non-vigesimal values IMO no more justifies claiming the system was not base 20 than the fact that we use clock faces with 12 digits means we don't really use base 10. -- Infrogmation 15:17, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'll check my sources and get back to you -- Gnomon.

I've looked into this and find that there were two systems in use by the Mayans. A pure base-20 system was used for normal purposes, but it did not use the numerals given here in this article. (Unfortunately, the numerals used have been destroyed by the invading Spanish, but it would have used a single symbol repeated as many times as necessary for 1's, another symbol repeated as many times as necessary for 10's, another for 100's and so on). The system described here was only used in the calendar codices and in stone inscriptions, and always used a mixed 18/20. Source: A Universal History of Numbers, Georges Ifrah.

I'll try and write that up and get it into the article.