Until Yukito Tanabe and Satoru Sugano published their paper "On the absorption spectra of complex ions", in 1954, little was known about the excited electronic states of complex metal ions.  They used Hans Bethes crystal field theory and Giulio Racahs linear combinations of Slater integrals, now called Racah parameters, to explain the absorption spectra of octahedral complex ions in a more quantitative way than had been achieved previously. Many spectroscopic experiments later, they estimated the values for two of Racah's parameters, B and C, for each d-electron configuration based on the trends in the absorption spectra of isoelectronic first-row transition metals. The plots of the energies calculated for the electronic states of each electron configuration are now known as Tanabe–Sugano diagrams.
Number must be fit for each octahedral coordination complex because the C/B can deviate strongly from the theoretical value of 4.0. This ratio changes the relative energies of the levels in the Tanabe–Sugano diagrams, and thus the diagrams may vary slightly between sources depending on what C/B ratio was selected when plotting.