why do we have capital/lowercase letters but not capital/lowercase numbers?
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Capital and lower case letters derive ultimately from different forms of the same letters – capital letters from the style of Roman letters used in places like public inscriptions, and lower-case letters from Roman cursive handwriting (plus a *whole lot* of subsequent letterform drift; Roman cursive is totally illegible to modern readers without special training). Originally they were entirely different styles of lettering, like the difference between fonts or the difference between a two-level <a> and a one-level <*a*>. The two sets got merged into a single system in the Middle Ages, though, with each set being used in different contexts and thus acquiring different meanings. The so-called ‘Arabic numerals’ were added into the set of symbols used to write European languages after this merger had already happened, and so they aren’t really a part of either system – they weren’t added to the set of lower-case letters or to the set of upper-case letters, but rather to the whole system formed by both sets as something of an entirely separate third set of symbols. They don’t derive from anything the Romans used, and they came in as one set of symbols rather than two equivalent sets, so there’s no basis for splitting them into two sets the way letters got split into two sets.
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