Roman arithmetic

In Rome, merchants used Roman numerals to perform basic arithmetic operations. In modern education, the Roman arithmetic used by the Romans is seldom taught. The prefered method is to convert the Roman numeral into an Arabic numeral and solve the equation using a modern positional notation system. While that's more practical, it is not really learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide Roman numerals, it is only making the student practice converting from Roman to Arabic and back again. Except for historical purposes, none of this is particularly useful to the grade student unless it is used to demonstrate the existence of different numeral systems and their impact on Arithmetic and to do that, the student needs to learn how to perform arithmetic operations in the native numeral system.

Related Topics:
Rome - Roman numerals - Arithmetic - Arabic numeral - Positional notation - Numeral system

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The two most basic operations of arithmetic are addition and subtraction. Multiplication is specialized form of addition where you quickly add identical numbers and division is a specialized form of subtraction where you quickly remove identical numbers.

Related Topics:
Addition - Subtraction - Multiplication - Division

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The use of subtractive notation with Roman numerals increased the complexity of performing basic arithmetic operations without conveying the benefits of a full positional notation system. In the algorithms that follow, the first step is to remove the subtractive notation from the numerals before any arithmetic operations. The subtractive notation is then reapplied to the solution as the end of the operation.

Related Topics:
Subtractive notation - Algorithms

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Roman abacus was a hand-held tool for assisting in the computations using Roman numerals.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~