56 total messages ever received? Or just 56 in your Inbox today?
I’ve cleared out mine, so there are zero. I assume the Roman numeral for zero is still 0?
Aye, 56 today, and I have never cleared it (so many memories 
)
The Romans had no concept for zero, that came quite a bit later. There was of course “nothing” but not in a numerical sense.
What do you mean by no concept of nothing? It’s hard to conceive such a notion.
So instead of zero, they would say there is “nil”? Hodie nil nuntii in caspa tabellaria habeo.
“Nothing” is a conceptual idea. What they lacked was “zero” which is a purely mathematical concept. It’s not so inconceivable if you realize that you can get by for the most part without using the number zero.
We have zero hens? Why not just say “We have no hens?”
With math, what is 10-10? According to a Roman, that would be “nothing”. What is 0x15? Well… they just didn’t do that kind of thing.
Perhaps I should have said instead, “Hodie nulli nuntii in caspa tabellaria habeo.”
I guess the Romans also didn’t do negative numbers, imaginary numbers, etc. I would have enjoyed math classes back then. ;D
would you? Try dividing CXLIV by VIII without doing any converting to our system.
Thank the gods the numerical system was mostly for counting ;D
Well, the answer is clearly XVIII. Isn’t it obvious? ;D
So here’s a question…
If we were to present this problem in Arabic numerals to the Romans (viz. 114 and 8 ), would they convert these two Roman numerals (viz. CXLIV and VIII) before doing their calculation?
Show your working, mariek. >:( ;D
Not if they didn’t understand Arabic numerals…
But if they did?
[quote author=bingley link=board=6;threadid=679;start=15#7364 date=1064907759]
Show your working, mariek. >:( ;D
[/quote]
OK, I admit to converting from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals before doing the calculation, and then converting the result back to Roman numerals. (Hence, my question earlier about whether a Roman would have converted from Arabic nuremars to Roman numerals to do their calculation.) Do you think less of me now for doing this? :
Oh! Marie… 
YES - Please keep the clutter down any clean out your PMs when you can. It actually does take up database space. About 3 MB right now.
Well, I couldn’t have performed the calculations in Roman numerals, either, so don’t feel bad.
And I do make an effort to keep my inbox cleaned out. I even have a Word document where I copy-and-paste the messages I especially want to keep, so I can go ahead and delete them.