"Outside Italy most merchants continued, however, to keep their accounts in Roman numerals till about 1550, and monasteries and colleges till about 1650..." — W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics
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The numbers over the beds in this painting show how long it took for decimal numerals to replace Roman in common use. European mathematicians started using decimal in the tenth century, but in everyday situations Roman numerals remained the norm for centuries afterward.https://twitter.com/jdmccafferty/status/1294612624382951426 …
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what is rarely mentioned is that astronomers already had the benefit of positional numerals because they (e.g. Ptolemy's Almagest) used Babylonian ones
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How many more centuries will it take for Americans to move to the clearly superior metric system?
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I spent 3 years in the silicon valley and could not get used to Farenheit degrees.
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So what you’re saying is Americans will finally adopt the metric system in about 2420
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You can imagine Descartes hanging out with that crowd, thinking there was a better way to label the beds and arrange them in a grid.
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Most people take it for granted how awesome the decimal number system is. And it's even more insane that Indian mathematicians came up with it between 1st and 4th centuries. It's sad that India is no longer in the frontier of maths. Hopefully it will come back.
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India has been very involved in math and physics in the last 100 years. The most famous is Ramanujan. But Bose and Chandrashekhar are almost as famous. In pure math today, one has people like the Murty brothers. IITB and IITD both have world class math departments.
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I don't know if this interpolation is apt. Because In Poland Roman numerals are still used to this day for ordinal needs. Also, hospitals are usually unique when it comes to language usage. In Arabic, they use really old-fashioned words to denote "room", "hall" etc.
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We still teach Roman numerals in primary school, at least in Portugal.
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