Numbers

The Arabic numbers 1 to 0 and all the various combinations they allow can be traced back to use in India over a thousand years ago. The first European record of such numbers is in a Spanish text of A.D. 976. The 3, 4, and 5 varied but 1, 6, 7, 8 ad 9 are similar to what one uses today.

The Romans and Greeks, however, chose a different method of writing. You are well acquainted with Roman numerals, but how did they evolve?

The earliest method of recording was not to write numbers but to notch wood or some other suitable substance. Try it and you will see the impractical side of such recordkeeping. The Greeks developed a formula based on 5, 10, 100, 1000 and 10000. To write pictographs that represented these numbers they used:

Writing was rare so other methods of indicating numbers were devised. Today we hold up various fingers to indicate small numbers. How often, when you ask a small child his age, does he hold up his hand? By holding up the hand and either bending or holding one or more fingers straight one can indicate numbers. In time, the way the Greeks held their fingers ( Latin word for finger is digitus, digiti m.) allowed one to show many different numbers. It is believed that this system evolved into the Roman numeral system.The thumb and forefinger of the left hand = 10 - 90. The other fingers = 1 - 9. The thumb and index finger of the right hand = 1,000 - 9,000 and the other three fingers 100 - 900. The same positioning represented the other numbers with the thumbs and index fingers of each hand indicating whether 10's, 100's, or 1,000's were intended. Try it and you can see how the system of Roman numerals might have evolved.

I - one finger raised, II - two fingers, etc., until V, when you use the index finger and thumb which, depending on how one holds the hand, can itself be a V form; an X is merely two V's, one upside down and placed beneath the first; L = 50, a variation of the Greek; C = 100 for the Latin word centum; D = 500 (demi-mille); M = 1000 (mille) but it could also be (I); thus, 10,000 =((I)); 100,000 =(((I))); 1,000,000 =((((I)))) and seldom used.

In time the practice of repeating the same digit four times was eliminated by subtracting 2 or 1 from the next highest number, which is why today one writes 29 as XXIX instead of XXVIIII. These numbers continued to be used for almost 2000 years as the basic numerical unit. Indeed, we still use them in many ways even today.

How did they count?

Greeks and Romans used a device called an abacus. In the orient, a similar device called a Sorban is used even today. In the mid-1960s there was a competition between an electronic calculator and a sorban... and the latter won. The abacus and sorban work very much as Roman numerals do, in a system of adding and subtracting pebbles or beads.

You can learn more about the abacus at this site: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacus/roman-hand-abacus.html