Stever's blog

Roman Numerals

The romans had no real concept of “multiplication”. Reason being is that their roman numeral system was so inefficient, you had to be a friggin’ genius to multiply two numbers together. Only geniuses could do it. The incas/indians, had a much more efficient numerical system, and could multply only because their numerical systems made it easy. They weren’t necessarily any SMARTER, per se, they just had a formal system that fit well with the concept of multiplication. (Oddly enough, concepts like the wheel had yet to be invented in Incan culture, even though it was obvious to the Romans).

We think better by inventing different representations. it’s something that we computer scientists strive to do. Programming languages like Hakell, Ruby or Lisp (my current favorite) makes this easy to do.