The Maya people had an unusual and advanced numbering system. At the time, most of the world had no concept of the number zero. The Maya,however,were using a flat, round shape as a symbol to represent this amount. Their counting system had only three symbol: a dot, which represented one, a bar for five, and the round shape for zero. The Maya also thought that certain numbers were very important. For example, the number 20 was special because of the total number of fingers and toes. The number 52 represented the number of years in a Mayan century.