This article is flatly wrong. Some early Romans may well have used so-called 'Roman numbers,' which retained some common use among the masses throughout the yea

This article is flatly wrong. Some early Romans may well have used so-called 'Roman numbers,' which retained some common use among the masses throughout the years; but any Roman of real education, particularly a Roman geometer or mathematician, of an era after around 100 BC would've used the more convenient and refined Greek numerals, which were base-10 just like our own, and which were in fact a bit more complex than our numbers in that they used separate characters for the tens and hundreds slots. In fact, the Greek system of numerals predates the Roman by hundreds of years. [See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals] This belief that Arabic numerals were the first base-ten system of numbers, that our own modern methods are vastly superior to the methods of the past, or that, as the author of this article puts it, "the Romans did not know anything about the binary system," is silly misinformation. And for what it's worth, Apollonius of Perga's treatise "On Conic Sections" is probably the most complex and beautiful mathematical treatise I know of before or since - and yes, that's counting everything from the modern era.