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List of numeral systems

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 14, 2026
Entity authorityQ3634986
Source-derived summary

There are many different numeral systems, that is, writing systems for expressing numbers.

By culture / time period

"A base is a natural number B whose powers (B multiplied by itself some number of times) are specially designated within a numerical system." The term is not equivalent to radix, as it applies to all numerical notation systems (not just positional ones with a radix) and most systems of spoken numbers. Some systems have two bases, a smaller (subbase) and a larger (base); an example is Roman numerals, which are organized by fives (V=5, L=50, D=500, the subbase) and tens (X=10, C=100, M=1,000, the base).

By type of notation

Numeral systems are classified here as to whether they use positional notation (also known as place-value notation), and further categorized by radix or base.

Standard positional numeral systems

The common names are derived somewhat arbitrarily from a mix of Latin and Greek, in some cases including roots from both languages within a single name. There have been some proposals for standardisation.

Non-standard positional numeral systems

Bijective numeration

Unary, or bijective base‑1, is used in Tally marks, and Counting. Unary numbering is used as part of some data compression algorithms such as Golomb coding. It also forms the basis for the Peano axioms for formalizing arithmetic within mathematical logic. A form of unary notation called Church encoding is used to represent numbers within lambda calculus.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “List of numeral systems” as wikimedia list article. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 232-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, numeral and systems can be independently traced.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3634986. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from List of numeral systems” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.