It wasn't a mistake, it was a decision to start at 1. They could also have started with 5 or 7, then a new century would begin nowadays at 2x05 or 2x07.

If you don't like it, start your own calendar and make it more popular than the Gregorian calendar.

Good luck with that.

Hello everyone, i'm silently reading this forum for quite a while and finally decided to make an account, so this is my first post on VGChartz.

As someone mentioned before the Gregorian calendar starts at year 1 and not with year 0. Why is that so? Because the Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582 and the concept behind and the nummber 0 it self wasn't fully intoduced/acepted until the 17th century.

So if it's true that this women was born on 4. Augst 1900 and we're using the Gregorian calendar, she was indeed born in the 19th century.

The Thing is, most countrys don't use the Gregorian calendar anymore.
countrys like the USA, China, Brasil, Russia, Germany, Japan etc. using the international standard ISO 8601 (first published in 1988). ISO 8601 is based on the Gregorian calendar but modified a lot of things like adding a year 0 (or should I say date 0?).

So by this modern and improoved calendar system, the last day of the 19th century is 31. Dezember 1899 and therefor Nabi Tajima is born in the first year of the 20th century.

p.s english is not my first language so please have mercy :D

Yeah sure because a decision can never be a mistake...

I don't have to like it or hate it. I just need to know what numbers mean. I just need to understand basic mathematics and I'm good.

Also I don't even need to start a new calendar since the NORM out there is the use of the decimal system within the Gregorian calendar and not the Gregorian logic.

If a super popular song, let's say by Michael Jackson as an example had been released let's say on May 1 1980, according to the flawed Gregorian calendar it's still the 70's, according to mathematical logic it's the 80's...

Well guess what decade people would say that song is from... Everybody would say it's a song of the 80's, Nobody would call a song released on May 1,1980 a 70's song.

So we may be using the flawed Gregorian calendar but it's the mathematical logic of our modern world that is applied most of the time. Same with the year 2000. I remember on the news everywhere it was celebrated as the NEW millennium. Again mathematical logic over Gregorian mistake.

So I don't need to make a new calendar because for all practical purposes and intent, the logic which I abide by is used all the time by everybody whether people realize it or not.

This is EXACTLY what I have been trying to explain. The difference between the Gregorian calendar as it was and the decimal system which we use and which makes more sense than how the calendar was used first.

1900 is the 20th century and 2000 is the 21st century which is way more logical than the old ways of the Gregorian calendar.

Thank you for clearing this up. And welcome to VGC.

What do you mean, you can't divide a letter

I've been dividing letters from early age :p

So you get the counting of the centuries, but not the numbering of the years within a century. How do you not see the contradiction.
First century goes from the first year up to and including the 100th year.
First millennium goes from the first century up to an including the 10th century.

Your are the one trying to be inconsistent ;)

20th century started on Jan 1st 1901.
Also means the third millenium started on Jan 1st 2001

Le google: 3rd millennium 2001 began on Monday, January 1and ends on Wednesday, December 31, 3000

Ok i understood your logic, it just depend on whether we consider the year X to be the Xth or the (X+1)th. But if you ask me, the first is much better (X for Xth seems logical for me since it's that way we do in all the other situations such as counting laps), and is the one used by most people. And the choice between the two is arbitrary, so nothing to do with "undebatable". What is undebatable is  mathematical logic, once axioms are choosen. But the choice of the axioms are arbitrary, so i think we can just stop arguing because there is no good answer

The 70's is not the same as the 7th decade.
The 1900's are also not the same as the 19th century.

The 1900's run from 1900 to including 1999.
19th century goes from 1801 to including 1900

There is no zeroth decade, however we did have the naughties or the 2000s
We now live in the second decade of the first century of the third millennium, or the 2010's.
It's just definitions, nothing to do with mathematics.

With this logic, the 1st century goes from 0001 to 0100 and here is the problem, you are missing the year 0000.
Yes, there is actually a year 0000, according to the original gregorian calendar this would be the year 1 BC but we're not using the original gregorian calendar anymore.

source:      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar

Didn't we just have this thread a few months ago? Did we suddenly get a new person from a 19th century, or was the last thread about the last person from the 1800s? I'm fairly sure it was about the 19th century though.

As far as I know, the Gregorian calendar is the calendar used for many practical purposes, and ISO 8601 isn't used very much in everyday use. As a simple example, dates are not written using ISO 8601 in English. We write, for example, Apr 22, 2018, or 4/22/2018 (which, if you ask me, is a really bad format, but it's still used), and not 2018-04-22.

In all honesty I didn't check to see if there was more on the following page as I assumed this was not something that would warrant multiple posts of debate. We are literally stating the exact same reasoning, only differing in convention.

As I said in my post, if you want to go with something like the astronomical system of numbering years then have at it, but don't step in and tell someone they are wrong for going by the accepted, conventional dating system that the vast majority of people subscribe to.

All attempts to categorize and label moments in time, after all, are nothing more than arbitrary human inventions. As I pointed out in my post, when we say "year 5" we're actually just using a label to represent all the time that passes between the end of year 4 and the start of year 6, just as we do with months, days, minutes, seconds and so forth, as at some point the reduction needs to end and becomes pragmatically unnecessary. 

To take what you said above "Second year of your life you have now lived one year", yes, that is exactly the line of thought that I've also been explaining. The only difference here is that your system would call the entire first year (as in 1) 0, and the entire second year 1. That is to say, the days spanning from 1/365 and 365/365 are building towards the completion of "0", which obviously makes little sense on face value. The number zero, after all, is meant to represent null value, and yet here it is being assigned real value. 224/365th of a year, for instance, would still be considered "zero" in this practice.

This was done to make the mathematics easier, but it also then necessitates two year 0's (BCE and CE), a worthwhile sacrifice to those doing the math but otherwise a practice that sounds and looks quite absurd given that zero is meant to be neither negative nor positive, while also still possessing a further unaddressed "zero" separating those two. Again, that was done purely for pragmatic reasons to make the mathematics easier rather than some statement against the logic underlying the conventional system.

So yes, after all of these words the real difference between the two viewpoints is that one system represents the year by its end value, while the former represents it with its beginning value. Both systems are inherently wrong but, for pragmatic reasons, are very useful. Pragmatically speaking, it makes a lot more sense for conventional use to not have two zeros, including a negative zero,  to represent all of the time contained within the course of one year. For the purposes of making mathematics easier, though, it makes pragmatic sense to actually have a year zero, and thereafter follow precisely the same reasoning for the date. It is entirely a matter of semantics and pragmatism, as in reality these labels are arbitrary inventions of we humans to categorize and record the passage of time. If it sounds like I used the word "pragmatism" a lot, it's because that is clearly the driving force behind all of these conventions lol

So, back to what I said in the first post: Feel free to use the astronomical dating system or whichever you like, but don't tell other people they are wrong for using the conventionally practiced and accepted method. Open up 99.99% of books and you'll find them utilizing the conventional method of dating; should the world suddenly adopt the double zero version for some reason I will happily oblige and adopt it myself. The whole point of these categorical divisions, after all, is to be on the same page and keep our understanding of the past and when events occurred as straight as possible as we communicate with one another, something that is pretty darn remarkable when you think about it.