Where can I find information on mathematics about number systems that have a changing base between each place? For example,

 

binary uses base 2

decimal uses base 10

 

But what about doing math on something like months where it is not a fixed base between each place?

 

What is this called?
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Another example could be seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks. There will be no special branch of mathematics dealing specifically with this, but the principle for the calculations is simple arithmetic.

Suppose you had a time T in seconds and you wanted to represent it by a single number which defined the number of weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Example: T=3380521. First we divide by 60: 56342 remainder 1. The seconds place will be 1, but we need to represent it by two positions because we don’t have a number system which has 60 symbols representing the integers from 0 to 59, so for the sake of example we just express seconds as a decimal. The last two digits of our converted number will be 01.

Now we divide 56342 by 60: 939 remainder 2. The minutes place will be 2. Again we need two positions for the minutes place. The last 4 digits of the converted number are 0201.

Now we divide 56342 by 60: 939 remainder 2. The minutes place will be 2. Again we need two positions for the minutes place. The last 4 digits of the converted number are 0201.

Next, divide 939 by 24: 39 remainder 3. The hours place will be 3. We could use the letters of the alphabet to represent integers from 0 to 23, where A=0 and X=23. So D=3, and the last 5 digits of our converted number are D0201.

Next, divide 39 by 7: 5 remainder 4. The days place is 4 and will always be a single digit because there are only 7 days in a week. The last 6 digits are now 4D0201. And the complete conversion is 54D0201. So T=54D0201 in time digits (let’s call this the chronical or temporal system) or 3380521 decimal. The weeks place in this number expands leftwards in decimal, so, for example, 25000000 would represent exactly 25 weeks. Note that we can’t take this system into months and years because months and years are variable in length.

 

by Top Rated User (1.1m points)

To convert back from temporal to decimal, we multiply the weeks digit by 7 and add to the days digit. So we have 5×7+4=39. Then we multiply 39 by 24 and add to the hours digit: 39×24+D=936+3=939. And so on: 939×60+2=56342; 56342×60+1=3380521.

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