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Although the Romans were very clever - they gave us central heating, democracy, road systems, fast food outlets and a host of other 'modern' things - there weren't a patch on the Greeks or Arabs when it came to mathematics (or, in the case of the Greeks, geometry). The problem was that their number system was very complex. based on 5s, rather than have 9 symbols and a zero as we do, and a decimal placement system as we now have, they had a complex system of using letters I, V, X, L, C, D, and M for 1,5,10,50,100,500 and 1000, with complex rules about the writing the numbers in between. They also had no symbol for zero (this was invented by the Arabs). So, when doing arithmentic, Roman numbers were cumbersome and even simple arithmetic was very difficult. When we adopted thhe Arabic system of numbers from 1 to 10, and a zero, with the 1 representing 1, 10, 100, 1000 etc depending upon its position, then arithmetic became very straightforward. So we still use Roman numbers today for simple counting (like on clock faces, or items in a list - (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) etc) but we cannot use Roman numbers when we need to do any arithmetic or more complex mathematics. So that is why the Arabic system has been adopted, not only in the Western world but virtually worldwide.

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16y ago

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