NUMBER STORIES
some of the troubles of three boys who found ways of adding numbers in spite of their awkward numerals.”
When Caius was a boy he attended a kind of business school. There he learned how to write, to read the parchment rolls that told of business customs, and to perform the only two operations with numbers that were then considered absolutely necessary. These operations were addition and subtraction, and when we come to think of it they cover a large part of our business arithmetic to-day. It is not often that we need a long multiplication or a long division.
If you are asked to add 257 and 369 you find the work so easy that you can hardly
imagine that it would ever trouble anyone. But when his teacher told Caius to add these
numbers written in the Roman numerals, the problem did not seem so simple. It is really
easier, however, than one would at first think, and if arithmetic required only adding, the
Roman numerals would not be very difficult. In the first place the Romans usually wrote
IIII instead of IV, VIIII instead of IX, and
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