It seems like an odd number especially fir the metric system.
In: 0
The number itself goes back to ancient times, like Babylon etc.
The rational is relatively simple though.
Imagine you have 10 coins and want to split them up equally among a group of people.
If you have 2, 5 or 10 people that works easily, but if you have 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 or more than 10 people it won’t work.
Now imagine you have 12 coins instead. You can split them up equally among 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 people but get problem with 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13 and more people.
This is why old units to measure things were often split up into 12 sub-units.
Nowadays we just use fractions and decimals and split every unit up into sub-units that are powers of 10 and even the British have given up on their weird non-decimal currency a while ago, but for people in older times were math was not yet as much of a thing and the common people weren’t well educated choosing some units that were easily divisible was an important thing.
Having something big that was divisible into 12, 24, 30, 60 or 360 units was beneficial.
it also helped that the universe itself seemed to be organized along similar line with a year having close to 360 days and a month having almost 30 days, it didn’t fir quite, but it was close enough.
So for time keeping and geometry which were closely linked through astronomy something with 12 as the basis made the most sense.
A circle might needed to be divided into quite fine sub-units.
360 was a good fit for that.
You could do half, a thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, eights, ninths, tenths, twelfths, fifteenths, twenty-fourths, thirtieth, forty-fifths, sixtieths, ninetieths and one-hundred-eightieths.
100 you can only divide by: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50
If you have an equilateral triangle and aren’t able to divided a circle into three equal parts that would be a problem.
In modern times we have subdivided a degree of a circle into minutes and seconds the same as we did hours. 60 minutes to a degree and 60 seconds to a minute.
60 is another of those numbers that are easily divisible by a number of small numbers.
We have also come up with other ways to divide a circle like gradians which have 100 to a right angle and radians which have half pi to right angle, but they are not used as much in every day life.
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