Roman Numerals: Google For Kids

Have you used the internet yet to find an answer to your child, grandchild, niece or nephew's question?

Tomorrow, February 7, 2010, at Super Bowl XLIV, the New Orleans Saints take on the Indianapolis Colts at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, Florida.  My 11-year-old son asked me the other day to explain the Roman Numerals that are displayed at the end of the Super Bowl title. As a parent I challenged myself to find a thorough answer for my son.  As a computer consultant, I turned to the internet.

I remembered that X = 10 and L = 50 but I couldn't remember if I'm supposed to add those or subtract them.  When looking for the answer to a question, I enter the search criteria into a Google search box.  I "googled" the term XLIV and found the following webpage:

http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/numbers.html

The website gave me a brief overview:

"The Romans were active in trade and commerce, and from the time of learning to write they needed a way to indicate numbers. The system they developed lasted many centuries, and still sees some specialized use today.

Roman numerals traditionally indicate the order of rulers or ships who share the same name (i.e. Queen Elizabeth II). They are also sometimes still used in the publishing industry for copyright dates, and on cornerstones and gravestones when the owner of a building or the family of the deceased wishes to create an impression of classical dignity. The Roman numbering system also lives on in our languages, which still use Latin word roots to express numerical ideas. A few examples: unilateral, duo, quadricep, septuagenarian, decade, milliliter.
The big differences between Roman and Arabic numerals (the ones we use today) are that Romans didn't have a symbol for zero, and that numeral placement within a number can sometimes indicate subtraction rather than addition."

There is also a handy converter.  Type your roman numeral in the box and it returns the answer.

XLIV = 44

Happy clicking,

Betsy Sabatini Coyne
The PC Teacher
bcoyne@thepcteacher.com
http://www.thepcteacher.com/