Week 49: Shirts I did not know I had - More on the Mayans

I guess the trip to Cancun and my encounter of the Mayan culture had a significant impact on me. In trying to find more t-shirts to blog about, I found a shirt that has a Mayan calendar. I had forgotten that I had this one and found it at my secondary site looking for unusual T-shirts.

Although I am not able to understand it, I love the symbols around the calendar (I am a sucker for symbols and calligraphy). The Mayans were excellent astronomers and mathematicians. To understand the Mayan calendar, you need to understand Mayan math. In researching the calendar, I found that the Mayans had the concept of zero and counted in Base 20 (For math geeks, that is how I will now say my age. It's better than hexadecimal or Base 16... but I digress). Also, I was surprised to learn that the Mayan calendar is very similar to the Gregorian calendar that we use today. Fascinating!

For more info on the Mayan calendar, I found this article on the Mayan calendar on HowStuffWorks.com very useful.