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Roman Numerals Brainstorming

History of Roman Numerals – How were they developed? Why were they developed?
Roman Numeral addition/subtraction
Where are Roman Numerals used? – movie credits, clocks, outlines, Charles the second
Learning how to use Roman Numerals
Where is the zero? (There is no way to write zero in Roman Numerals.)
Why don’t we use Roman Numerals very much today?
How many letters are used in Roman Numerals?
Why aren’t there any negative Roman Numerals?
Did everyone in Rome learn how to use Roman Numerals or were they just for some of the people?



I've seen websites devoted to explaining how to read RNs but not much about
how they were created. Lines for 1,2,3 and C for 100 (centum), but not much
more. So a more detailed breakdown of how they were created might be fun.
Maybe your focus needs to be on how they failed to dominate Western math,
whereas Arabic numerals, from a culture that many Westerners today feel has
not kept pace with the modern world, nonetheless became the universal system
of numerical notation. Why is that? And if you were teaching first grade in
Rome, would they have a system for addition and subtraction that we can
understand without reference to Arabic numerals?

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