Why Base 60?

 

As I was thinking about this the first thing that I thought of was how you might count to 60 on your hands. What else would be a convenient reason for a base? Maybe they split each finger (excluding the thumb) into thirds and counted by 5's. In this case you could count 60 on one hand. It is different from 10 in that is quite a bit larger and there are less patterns that can be found later on. From 60 to 3600 is a large gap compared to 10 to 100. 

Maybe the choice of 60 has something to do with astronomy or physics. I'm not familiar with the history but 60 tends to be a significant number. It is the number of seconds in a minute, the number of minutes in an hour, as well as the number of minutes in a degree. Maybe there is some connection there. I'm pretty sure I remember taking a psychology course where your range of vision is only so many degrees so maybe that is also connected. Maybe they measured how many fingers they could see in front of themselves at an arms length away. I kind of enjoy this guessing game. 

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After a google search about base 60, I am not sure how accurate I was in terms of what I was guessing. The Babylonians counted in six groups 10, not five groups of 12, so it is unlikely that it was based on hands. Although it seems like other cultures used this method of counting. It was also interesting to find out its applicability to fractions as 60 is divisible by a large number of prime numbers. The example that stood out to me was 1/3 in base 10 is 0.3333... but in base 60 it 20/60 = 0.2. It seems like the use with fractions is a strong contender for why they used base 60. Other theories include the use in physics. But my guess would be the fractions argument as it is just more aesthetically satisfying.