Roman numerals

[fayanora]

The more I think about the Roman empire and Roman numerals, the more baffled I become. Like, the Romans must have been some pretty amazingly competent people to have an entire empire like that with such a shitty numeral system as Roman numerals. How the fuck did they even do math with a number system like that? Or did they just use abacuses and

Comments

[kengr]

I thought I showed you how you could do roman numerals on an abacus?

bring a pad with some scratch paper and something to use as tokens, and I can show you how counters worked. Basically an abacus with lines on a flat surface instead of wires.

And the guy who wrote the article missed the biggest reason that IV, IX, etc weren't used back in the old days.

If you use them then it's way too easy to alter the accounts ledger by changing a V to an IV and pocketing the extra.