michael_nielsen

Imagine you're a designer or mathematician living in ancient Rome. Being a curious & imaginative sort, used to exploring wild ideas, you ask yourself: is there some way you can improve on the roman numeral system? Might it be possible to find a better way of representing number?

Now, I'm pretty certain this would have seemed a wild idea to most of your contemporaries. But from our modern vantage point we know that in fact a much better system is possible: arabic numerals.

So a modern phrasing of the question might be: how to invent arabic numerals, assuming you only know roman numerals?

To be clear, I'm not talking here about delving into the actual history of arabic numerals. That's long and complex and fascinating, but this is a different kind of challenge.

What I'm talking about is a kind of discovery fiction, a plausible line of reasoning that might have led you to the discovery of arabic numerals, with roughly the set of raw materials on hand in ancient rome.