An early example of a nondecimal positional number system

Abstract

The idea of nondecimal number systems was developed during the 17th century by several mathematicians, especially by Thomas Harriot, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz and Erhard Weigel. Already at the end of the 16th century, a German mathematician Anton Schultze described the base-24 positional number system and showed the basic arithmetic operations in this system. Schultze did so in an example that he included in his textbook of commercial arithmetic published in 1584 and – in a slightly modified form – in an extended version of the textbook that appeared in 1600.