March 03, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
Greeks and Later Romans Made Distinct Progress in Their Number Notation Systems
Let us see how the Greeks then constructed their numbers from
these alphabetical notations.
So a Greek or an Ionian would have written 15 not as alpha-epsilon
or αε but as ιε or iota-epsilon.
Similarly 51 would be written not as epsilon-alpha but as nu-alpha
or να.
You see mon ami what I am getting at.
Greek did make a huge leap in designating special figure for each digit,
but they still did not get the idea of using the position to assign a digits
value.
Even though it was right under their nose very literally and had
already at least once been discovered by the Sumerians or the Babylonians.
They could have saved so much of a mess by not having to assign a
special figure for 20, 30, 40, 50 and so on.
Even the smart ones are fallible.
This system has another fault.
What if you decide to get rid of some alphabets from your
dictionary of language altogether.
There again one will be forced to retain them in numbers though they
cease to exist in your language.
This will mess up the previously written numbering.
After the Greeks, the Romans showed yet another improvement in the
mathematical notation.
These smart guys alienated the numbering systems from the
alphabets.
Unlike the Greek number notation, we all are familiar with the
Roman notation.
Even though the Romans did disconnect the numbers from their
alphabets, yet in a way they continued to use the alphabets, or at least some
of them for their numbers.
They converted their V to 5 and their X to 10.
They used L to represent 50 and C for 100.
Hence their numbers came to be known as letter-numbers.
Here they did exploit the position for representations, but in a
different fashion than the way we are used to.
For example, 50 is written as L, 40 as XL and 60 as LX.
In this system, the good progress was that there was no need to
have special symbols for 20, 30, 40, 60, 70 and so on.
With the Is, Vs, Ls, Cs and so on a plenty could be written though
with system on notation even some small numbers could get pretty long.
Take into consideration 88.
88 would be written as VXXXVIII though 90 is simply written as XC.
Most are not aware of the fact that the length of the Roman numbers
increases fractally with the size of the numbers.
What on earth is this fractal increase?
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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