Why would 60 be a convenient, significant or especially useful number to use as the base for a number notational system, in comparison to the number 10? From the top of my mind, base 60 has more factors than base 10, such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60; while 10 only has 1, 2, 5, and 10. With 60 being divisible by more factors than 10, it may be easier to split it up into smaller subsections. Smaller subsections could account for more accuracy in measurement of time, etc.
How do we use 60s in our own daily lives in Canada and other cultures? All over the world, we use 60's in time by measuring seconds per minute and minutes per hour. And as discussed in class, the year consists of nearly 360 days which is almost divisible by 60. In our education system, when we learn about geography in school, where the geological coordinates that we use are also in base 60. Another example of base 60 being used in other cultures, would be the Chinese.
According to Wikipedia, "in the Chinese calendar, a sexagenary cycle in commonly used, in which days or years are named by positions in a sequence of 10 stems and in another sequence of ten stems and in another sequence of 12 branches. The same stem and branch repeat every 60 steps through this cycle." It seems that the Sexagesimal is used frequently to measure time, angles and geographic coordinates because base 60 is divisible by 3, where as 10 is not. So when trying to express 1/3 in decimal form in base 10, you would end up having a repeating decimal. However, in a Sexagesimal system, 1/3 would be 20/60 which is basically 0.2 in the Sexagesimal system (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-joy-of-sexagesimal-floating-point-arithmetic/).
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