this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Gift from ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians love 12 & base 60. They also liked 7. Those numbers recur in their mythology.
Americans have a weird fixation with ๐ฏ. Where Americans might use percentages, I've seen Japanese plot values in [0, 1] (ie, pure proportions).
It's not about mythology or Mesopotamia. Those numbers are called highly composite numbers (HCN) and superior highly composite numbers (SHCN) and are great for doing calculations (especially divisions) in your head because they have a lot of factors. That's why they were used everywhere before calculators were a thing.
That's probably why Mesopotamians chose them: the convention traces back to them. Measuring angles in degrees also traces back to them.
Still, those numbers/units are quite arbitrary & introduce unnecessary conversions. Radians are dimensionless & require no conversion. Converting seconds to a more natural unit like days involves reintroducing those highly composite numbers that fit better in base-60 than the base-10 system we now use.