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It is hard to build a distributed banking system without reliable accounting, and reliable accounting in Europe only became possible with the import of Indian/A
by inglor_cz 2y ago
It is hard to build a distributed banking system without reliable accounting, and reliable accounting in Europe only became possible with the import of Indian/Arabic positional numeric system.
We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy.
On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
- mkehrt 2y agoOh come on, no one was doing arithmetic in Roman numerals. They were using abaci and writing down the results.
- inglor_cz 2y agoThat is precisely the problem. Abacus sorta works, but arithmetics is much more efficient for the same purpose, and gives you ability to do calculations that can't be done using an abacus. It is a difference similar to the one between a horse and a car.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoWouldn't using an abacus imply using a base-10 system (i.e. not Roman numerals)? Or were there specific abaci designed around the Roman system?
- mkehrt 2y agoWikipedia says it was base 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoThat's interesting that it implies that they had concepts of zero and place-value number systems. I can imagine Romans complaining about people sticking with the Roman number system as they converted numbers to and from their abacus.
- Ekaros 2y agoLooking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals that abacus makes lot more sense. It was not base 10 system, but bi-quinary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-quinary_coded_decimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-quinary_coded_decimal). For larger numbers very messy number, but one must think of how V is 5, L 50 and D 500. So they did not really have place value system. Or at least logical leap from abacus to place value. Instead they had 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and summed or deducted these. Sometimes in stylistic ways.