Forgot to mention the most important factor why 60 was used -- it was adopted a time prior to the modern decimal point notation. Prior to the development of such a concept, values between 0 and 1 were represented as simple fractions. IIRC the ancient Egyptians used a notation for fractions (and sums of fractions) that were restricted to 1/n where n is an integer. One other thing that took mathematicians some time to get a handle on -- irrationals (i.e. numbers that cannot be represented as a ratio of whole numbers -- n/m where n and m are integers).