Pounds, shillings, and pence

Haven’t seen a ten bob note (10 shilling) since I was a kid. Hardly ever had a farthing or a crown in my change, but the rest of the coins are familiar to me.

Another example of 120: the California State Legislature is a bicameral body with 120 total members, with 80 in the Assembly (lower house) and 40 in the Senate (upper house).

And a related piece of trivia regarding fractional currencies: although the USD has been decimalized more-or-less since its inception, the USA stock markets continued to use fractional prices for shares up until 2001, down to 1/16 of a dollar.

With money you don't want everything to be as divisible as possible, you want everything to be able to be put together with as few pieces as possible.

So 20 is very useful, 120 not as much.

60 Hz power is the rare good call over European 50, though. Gets you 60Hz television as a standard and even though modern displays don't care about the frequency of power as much that eventually gets you to 120Hz displays, which is super useful to support tons of display frequencies on even intervals. You can finally get evenly paced 24fps movies again.

IIRC several of the like top 5 schools of math are french so that checks out.