How did Romans do (advanced) math using Roman numerals?
In: 590
For the most part, they used counting boards or abaci to actually do the computations. The Roman numerals were just used to record the results.
It’s still possible to do *any* modern advanced math with roman numerals. It’s just more time consuming. Math is still the same.
Not very much advanced math at the time. I spnt think algebra or zero had been invented.
Definitely no calculus, or matrices
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They didn’t do calculations using Roman numerals.
Instead, they used calculus.
No, not the Newton-Leibniz one.
A *calculus* is a little *calx*; that is, a small piece of limestone — a pebble.
Calculi, pebbles, were used on counting-boards, with techniques similar to the later abacus.
The word “calculation” comes from the calculi that were used to do it.
We still use rocks to do our arithmetic today, but these days we use silicon instead of limestone.
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.
I recall seeing a picture in an encyclopedia that showed a Roman puppet being driven crazy by trying to write out multiplication using Roman numerals, with a caption highlighting how difficult such a process would be.
They didn’t.
Most of the sophisticated math was done with Greek numerals, not Latin numbers. Greek numbers aren’t as nice as arabic numbers, but it’s a proper base 10 system rather than the goofy hodgepodge base 5 you see on the back of movie cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals
I can’t speak to exactly how the Romans did it. But I do know of two ways people wrote math before the widespread standardization of math symbols.
1) Equations were often written out in a sentence, such that 4x² + 1/4, would be like “The sum of one fourth and a square of any number multiplied by four.”
2) Mathematicians had their own personal symbols. Depending on whether they wanted people to understand it or not, they sometimes explained what the symbols meant at the beginning of what they wrote. Eventually, some symbols began to be used by others.
This link may have some answers for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notation#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DWritten_mathematics_began_with_numbers%2Cor_person%2C_or_anything_else.?wprov=sfla1
you can do any kind of math using roman numerals, we just use arithmetic number which comes from egypt??? somwhere in the middle east wer numbers were base on the angles it could represent. So it doesnt matter
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