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
Decimal
Mayan
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
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
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:
