Origins: Adding Up - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > January/February 2006

Origins: Adding Up

Roman numerals derive from Etruscan counting systems

As I write this, the National Football League season is underway, and U.S. football fans are looking forward to Superbowl XL. Some of us are old enough to have watched all the Superbowls, starting with Superbowl I back in MCMLXVII, when Vince Lombardi’s legendary Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs XXXV to X in the old Los Angeles Coliseum. These days I root for the Carolina Panthers, who lost Superbowl XXXVIII to the New England Patriots, XXXII to XXIX, in a contest remembered more for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction than for the football game. In terms of mathematical […]

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Footnotes

1.

There is an interesting echo of these symbols in the modern metric system. Since the metric prefixes for multipliers are Greek, we use d- for ten (deka-), h- for hundred (hecto-),and k- for thousand (kilo-).