Decimal the Roman numerals did, an intermediate base of 5. Notably, the polymath Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BC) invented a decimal positional system in his Sand Reckoner which was based on 10 and later led the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to lament what heights science would have already reached in his days if Archimedes had fully realized the potential of his ingenious discovery. The Hittites hieroglyphs (since 15th century BC), just like the Egyptian and early numerals in Greece, was strictly decimal. Some non-mathematical ancient texts like the Vedas dating back to 1900–1700 BCE make use of decimals and mathematical decimal
Decimal digits after the decimal separator, such as in " is the approximation of to "two decimals"". The numbers that may be represented in the decimal system are the decimal fractions, that is the fractions of the form , where is an integer, and is a nonnegative integer. The decimal system has been extended to "infinite decimals", for representing any real number, by using an infinite sequence of digits after the decimal separator (see Decimal representation). In this context, the decimal numerals with a finite number of non–zero places after the decimal separator are sometimes called "terminating decimals". A repeating decimal,