Well, basically, they didn’t. Most Roman maths was addition and subtraction, and they used tables and the abacus for multiplying. I don’t remember how they did division, but it must have been painful.
On top of that, most of this was integers with a very limited range, no zero, no negative numbers in the modern sense. For some uses, they had a “kind of fractions” based on 1/12.
So, for the Romans, “26 divided by 4 is 6, remainder 2” was *advanced* math. And “26 divided by 4 is 6 and a semi” (semi=6/12) was *very advanced* math.
Forget things like calculus, that was 1500 years later.
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