How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
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How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
1–10 of 163 posts
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#2I had, for some reason, never thought of that directly. Although I do remember some joke on arithmetics in one of the Asterix comic books.
But reading this article and trying out a few things, I found it was great fun!
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#3Okay so the article is wrong about some points. We have evidence for both IIII and IV notation in classic roman archeological finds. The obvious example is the entrance fee doors around the colliseum in Rome, they're are engraved with numbers, in both forms of notation.
Seriously I figured they used abacus for everything they just figured out the notation to write it down in at the end some would convert to the if notation while others would not.
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#4Okay so the article is wrong about some points. We have evidence for both IIII and IV notation in classic roman archeological finds. The obvious example is the entrance fee doors around the colliseum in Rome, they're are engraved with numbers, in both forms of notation. Seriously I figured they used abacus for everything they just figured out the notation to write it down in at the end some would convert to the if no…
> We have evidence for both IIII and IV notation in classic roman archeological finds.
The article doesn't say subtractive notation was not used in classic roman times, it says only that it was rare.
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#5In 2017 we just do:
$ perl6 -e 'say Ⅻ / Ⅲ'
4Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#6It's interesting how the notation used can encourage or retard progress. For example, Leibniz's calculus notation was vastly superior to Newton's, and calculus theory advanced much more quickly where Leibniz's notation was used.
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#7Okay so the article is wrong about some points. We have evidence for both IIII and IV notation in classic roman archeological finds. The obvious example is the entrance fee doors around the colliseum in Rome, they're are engraved with numbers, in both forms of notation. Seriously I figured they used abacus for everything they just figured out the notation to write it down in at the end some would convert to the if no…
> We have evidence for both IIII and IV notation in classic roman archeological finds. The article doesn't say subtractive notation was not used in classic roman times, it says only that it was rare.
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Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#8Okay so the article is wrong about some points. We have evidence for both IIII and IV notation in classic roman archeological finds. The obvious example is the entrance fee doors around the colliseum in Rome, they're are engraved with numbers, in both forms of notation. Seriously I figured they used abacus for everything they just figured out the notation to write it down in at the end some would convert to the if no…
It seems the subtractive notation was used for engravings, where keeping it short was important and nobody was going to do calculations with the numbers anyway.
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#9Here's the article on its own site: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3330/how-did-anyone...
Re: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?
#10It's interesting how the notation used can encourage or retard progress. For example, Leibniz's calculus notation was vastly superior to Newton's, and calculus theory advanced much more quickly where Leibniz's notation was used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_notation
Notation is extremely important. It's basically a way to organize how you abstract a problem. If your abstraction is "bad" it will be harder to solve certain problems.
It's really not much different everywhere else in society. Different programming languages/frameworks/etc. are doing essentially the same thing (if you ignore the speed of execution). All the languages are Turing complete and can do more or less the same IO. But it's still much easier for people to use certain tools for certain problems than others.
The right notation allows you to focus on what's important and forget what is not.