Saturday, October 4, 2008

Number Converter Arabic Numerals to Roman Numerals

Number Converter Arabic Numerals to Roman Numerals


Arabic Numerals to Roman Numerals Converter


The Problem of addition with Roman Numerals


It's hard to add subtract multiply and divide with Roman numerals. Like me, I'm sure you would find it very difficult to add the following!

CCXXXII
+ CCCCXIII
+ MCCXXXI
+ MDCCCLII
= MMMDCCXXVIII

Roman numerals didn't support arithmetic as they were simply abbreviations for physical amounts. In fact business people in ancient Rome would use calculators whenever they needed work with Roman numerals. The calculator back then was the abacus. Like most other numerical systems Roman numerals were mainly concerned with addition. In the beginning, the digits were independent of one another. One Roman numeral next to another usually meant that you would add their values together. So II was two and III was three.

Rules of Roman Numerals


Yet the Romans began to introduce silly rules. Instead of four being IIII they made it IV. The Roman numeral rule was where a small digit was placed to the left of a larger digit, the smaller digit would be subtracted from the larger digit. So IV meant 1 from 5 while VI meant 5 plus 1. Therefore a digit could be both positive or negative in effect depending on whether it was to the right or left of a higher digit! So while the Roman Empire came to dominate the world, their system of numbers was in reality not that good.

Roman Numerals were superceded by the Arabic Numerals we use today.
http://www.australiannumerals.org/ArabicNumeralstoRomanNumeralsNumbersConverter.html

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