A sign-value notation represents numbers by a series of numeric signs that added together equal the number represented. In
Roman numerals
Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, ...
for example, X means ten and L means fifty. Hence LXXX means eighty (50 + 10 + 10 + 10). There is no need for zero in sign-value notation.
History
Sign-value notation was the ancient way of writing numbers and only gradually evolved into place-value notation, also known as
positional notation
Positional notation (or place-value notation, or positional numeral system) usually denotes the extension to any base of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (or decimal system). More generally, a positional system is a numeral system in which th ...
. When ancient people wanted to write "two sheep" in clay, they could inscribe in clay a picture of two sheep. But this would be impractical when they wanted to write "twenty sheep". In
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the ...
they used small
clay tokens to represent a number of a specific commodity, and strung the tokens like beads on a string, which were used for accounting. There was a token for one sheep and a token for ten sheep, and a different token for ten goats, etc. To ensure that nobody could alter the number and type of tokens, they invented a clay envelope shaped like a hollow ball into which the tokens on a string were placed and then baked. If anybody contested the number, they could break open the clay envelope and do a recount. To avoid unnecessary damage to the record, they pressed archaic number signs on the outside of the envelope before it was baked, each sign similar in shape to the tokens they represented. Since there was seldom any need to break open the envelope, the signs on the outside became the first written language for writing numbers in clay, using sign-value notation.
See also
*
History of ancient numeral systems
Number systems have progressed from the use of fingers and tally marks, perhaps more than 40,000 years ago, to the use of sets of glyphs able to represent any conceivable number efficiently. The earliest known unambiguous notations for number ...
*
Place-value notation
*
Location arithmetic: A base 2 sign-value notation invented by J. Napier in 1617
References
Sources
* (Paperback).
External links
Online Converterfor Decimal/Roman Numerals (
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
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Numeral systems
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