Roman numbers

Roman numbers

What ?

Roman numbers spead across Europe during the Roman empire.

The Romans counted in tens and used letters as numerals.

For European, this was the main way of writting numbers for 2000 years.

Moreover, in the modern world, we still Roman numbers in clocks, the name of royalty, in specific texts and in books with paragraphs numbered.

At the beginning, What it’s used for ?

Roman numerals were used by ancient Romans to, in just seven letters, write whole numbers until 4,999.

At the beginning, Roman numerals were invented to help with record keeping.

They were used on receipts to track payments and deliveries but also                  

 used to mark the date of construction of houses.

1. Starting with the 14th century, Roman numerals were gradually replaced by Hindu-Arabic numerals. The Arabic numerals had many practical advantages over the Roman numerals. 
3. What were the disadvantages of Roman numerals and Why don’t we use Roman numerals today? 

There are four disadvantages :

• There is no zero : The Roman numerals consist of seven symbols used to express all the other numbers and there is actually no letter for zero.The presence of 0 makes life easier and practical in terms of notation, everyday life and scientific purposes.

• It’s hard to calculate with Roman numbers : The Roman numerals make it hard to add, subtract or multiply numbers.
• It’s complicated to write fractions : For expressing fractions, the Romans used a base 12 system, namely a duodecimal system and named the fractions with words.
• I’ts not easy for common people to understand this system :  the Roman numeral system required at least basic knowledge of specific rules and many people can’t understand the numbers.

Advantages :

There are 3 advantages :

• With the Roman numeral system only 7 characters are needed to represent numbers whereas the Hindu-Arabic system needs 10.
• The Roman numeracy system was the most advanced amongst the ancient civilisations around the Mediterranean Sea.
• Roman numerals are still being used today while other ancient numeracy systems have almost been forgotten.

Extra :

Romans used abacuses to make calculations: it is a rectangular tablet with columns for each power of ten (1 - 10 - 100 - 1000 - 10,000 ...) on which tokens were placed to represent the numbers. Abacuses were used for a very long time.

This abacus was convenient for addition and subtraction. For multiplication, they performed the sum of several partial products (same principle as current multiplication). They therefore performed repeated additions and subtractions for multiplications and divisions.

The Roman numeral system marked a clear regression compared to other numerals in history, because operations were complex.

Lucius Tarutius Firmanus was a famous mathematician.

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