How did Romans do (advanced) math using Roman numerals?
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Most ancient cultures didn’t do math with their numerals. Their numeral systems were used for recording numbers, but any math they did was with devices such as the abacus or counting board.
In order to efficiently do math with numerals, your system needs a couple different attributes: first, it needs to be a ‘base’ system (like our current base 10 system). Second, you need to have symbols for each digit up to the base.
For example, the Babylonians had a base 60 system, but they only had symbols for 1 and 5. So to write 68 they would put a 1 in the sixties place and a 5 and three 1s in the ones place. If you try to do addition or multiplication using these numerals, it kind of works, but you run into issues carrying numbers. There was also the issue where they didn’t have a symbol for 0, so there was no placeholder.
The Mayans had a similar system: base 20 (mostly, though one of their places only went up by a factor of 18 instead of 20), but they only had symbols for 1 and 5.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic system was similar to Roman numerals in that there was no base, though they didn’t have the subtraction rules based on the order of the symbols that the Romans had.
None of these cultures really used their numerals for mathematics. It was the Arabs that started that using their base 10 system that eventually became the system we use today (Edit: the Hindu-Arabic numeral system actually originated in India. Thanks to Illiad7342 for the correction). This is one of the main reasons that their number system spread throughout the world.
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