> The view of the Roman Numerals strongly supports John Conway's guess:
>> ......... However, my guess is that they probably DID know it
>> up to U by V, which permits an only slightly more complicated
>> method which is presumably roughly what the abacists used.
> Unfortunately, we do not have a primer to computing from the ancients
> Heinz Lueneburg
I agree with Heinz on one major point. We do not know of any U, V
type number theory use of Roman Numerals, as implied by John Conway
and others that have guessed on the ancient methods. What we do know
of Roman Numerals falls into two categories:
1. That Roman Numeral computations were primarily based on the abacus,
a business application. Scientific notation has NOT been documented
within Roman Numerals for a very good reason, a scientific notation
system already existed.
2. That Greeks, Romans and Medivels (at least to Fibonacci) all used
the very old finite Egyptian fractions for their scientific numeration
system (except for rare irrational number situations that appeared after
Pythagoras). It should also be noted Ptolemy added the spice of base 60
to his infinite series astronomical calculations that, also accepted
rounded off numbers, sanctioning irrational distances (and angles).
Regards to all,
Milo Gardner