Mayan Calculator

2016

Mayan Calculator

I wanted to make a working Mayan calculator.

You can also view the calculator fullscreen 

Mayan Numbers

  • Mayan numbers are base 20.
  • Mayan digits are made of dots and lines. A dot is one and a line is 5; a bit like a tally.
  • Mayan numbers are writtem vertically with the units at the bottom.

    For example:
    Mayan Numbers

    Mayan Numbers

    Decimal         Mayan
    10,0001,000100101
           
    160,000
    8,000
    400
    20
    1

My Mayan Calculator

  • The calculator only works with positive numbers. Any negative number will give a result of zero.
  • It only works with whole numbers. Any decimals are rounded to a whole number.
  • It only supports upto 6 Mayan digits which is upto 64,000,000 in decimal.

What I Did

  • First I designed the calculator on paper.
    Wooden Calculator

    Wooden Calculator

  • Then I made the calculator out of wood.
  • I wanted the calculator to work so I took a picture of the wooden one I had made,
  • I had to then make a font of the Mayan numbers. I did this on fontstruct.com  . Because there are 20 Mayan digits I used the capital letters A-T for the numbers. Mayan letters do not have capitals and lower case so I kept the lower case letter (a-z) for the Mayan letters. I only needed to make a Mayan "c" for the Clear button. I also added the basic maths symbols to my new Mayan font.
  • I then needed to work out how to convert between base 20 and base 10 so I could do all the calculations in base 10.
  • Finally, I wrote some Python code to make a working Mayan Calculator.


You can download my font of Mayan numbers here.
For the Mayan translations I used paleoaliens.com  


If you like my Mayan Calculator and want to include it on your website just copy and paste the code below to your page: