Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons^™

Literary Evidence For Roman Arithmetic With Fractions, David W. Maher, John F. Makowski

Classical Studies: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Roman arithmetic is a perennially troubling subject for both classicists and mathematicians. Scholars universally comment on the difficulty posed by Roman alphabetical notation both in expressing simple figures and in doing written calculations. For example, Lloyd Motz and Jefferson Weaver with exasperation ask, "How ... can anyone do any arithmetic with DCCCLXXXVIII, the Roman equivalent of 888?," and Florian Cajori concludes that the Romans must have resorted to the abacus in order to multiply a number like 723 (DCCXXIII) by 364 (CCCLXIV).' Yet our sources, literary and inscriptional, indicate that the Romans were capable of highly sophisticated calculations, and, of …