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Logic Behind numbers

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Have you ever thought Why .......

1 means "One", and
2 means "Two"?

The Roman numerals are easy to understand but what was the logic behind the Phonecian numbers?

The numbers we all use (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) are known as "Arabic " numbers to distinguish them from the " Roman Numerals " (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, etc).

Actually the Arabs popularized these numbers but they were originally used by the early Phonecian Traders to count and keep track of their trading accounts.

It's all about angles !

It's the number of angles. If one writes the numbers down (see below) on a piece of paper in their older forms, one quickly sees why. I have marked the angles with "o"s.


No 1 has one angle.
No 2 has two angles.
No 3 has three angles.
etc.

and "O" has no angles












Interesting, isn't it?
An ancient phonecian manuscript explains this and I thought it to be fascinating.




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This Post has 7 Comments Add your own!
Anonymous - December 31, 2008 at 3:40 PM

You're just making this up. If you look at typographic derivation charts, you'll see that no one writes "7" that way you are doing here. Not with a slash through the middle (a relatively recent idea) and certainly not with another curl at the bottom. (And your "9" is also fiction.)

And the numeral 3 didn't come about for the reasons that you say. Rather, it started as three lines that gradually became connected because it's faster to write the three lines that way.

By - Don Libes

Stranger - December 31, 2008 at 3:41 PM

Hi Don Libes

Thanks for your comments dear

First of all i would like to tell you that i am not trying to making things up.

All the numbers written over here are used in old days by "Phonecian Traders " now a days these number are don't have the same shape.

Same case with the English alphabet they also have different shape.

Anonymous - December 31, 2008 at 3:42 PM

Hmm an Interesting article but i didn't understand a little part
The words
1 means "One" and
2 means "Two" due to the number of angles in them!

But how were the angles named?

We name them as one angle or two angle but only after assuming 2 is two or 1 is one!! If 2 is two due to the two angle then what do you call 2 if the number of angles was named as three
Would 2 be called three then ??

Anonymous - December 31, 2008 at 3:42 PM

hey its an interesting piece of info but do we know dat 0 was not introduced in counting by that time nd it was later invented by indian mathematicians to enrich the counting technique.
so i do think dis is not the authentic piece of information , esp u can see the way 7 has been represented to acommondate 7 circles.have we seen such a 7 anywhere??

by - hornet

Anonymous - December 31, 2008 at 3:43 PM

I The easiest way to note down a number is to make that many marks - little I's. Thus I means 1, II means 2, III means 3. However, four strokes seemed like too many....
V So the Romans moved on to the symbol for 5 - V. Placing I in front of the V — or placing any smaller number in front of any larger number — indicates subtraction. So IV means 4. After V comes a series of additions - VI means 6, VII means 7, VIII means 8.
X X means 10. But wait — what about 9? Same deal. IX means to subtract I from X, leaving 9. Numbers in the teens, twenties and thirties follow the same form as the first set, only with X's indicating the number of tens. So XXXI is 31, and XXIV is 24.
L L means 50. Based on what you've learned, I bet you can figure out what 40 is. If you guessed XL, you're right = 10 subtracted from 50. And thus 60, 70, and 80 are LX, LXX and LXXX.
C C stands for centum, the Latin word for 100. A centurion led 100 men. We still use this in words like "century" and "cent." The subtraction rule means 90 is written as XC. Like the X's and L's, the C's are tacked on to the beginning of numbers to indicate how many hundreds there are: CCCLXIX is 369.
D D stands for 500. As you can probably guess by this time, CD means 400. So CDXLVIII is 448. (See why we switched systems?)
M M is 1,000. You see a lot of Ms because Roman numerals are used a lot to indicate dates. For instance, this page was written in the year of Nova Roma's founding, 1998 CE (Common Era; Christians use AD for Anno Domini, "year of our Lord"). That year is written as MCMXCVIII. But wait! Nova Roma counts years from the founding of Rome, ab urbe condita. By that reckoning Nova Roma was founded in 2751 a.u.c. or MMDCCLI.

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V

Larger numbers were indicated by putting a horizontal line over them, which meant to multiply the number by 1,000. Hence the V at left has a line over the top, which means 5,000. This usage is no longer current, because the largest numbers usually expressed in the Roman system are dates, as discussed above.

Anonymous - December 31, 2008 at 5:03 PM

"Phonecian Traders" (assuming you mean Phoenician) used numerals which looked nothing like modern western numerals. This might be a nice tool for teaching 2-year-olds to write numbers if you could first explain to them what an angle is (good luck), at least until you get to 9 (oops!)

But what you have written here I must assume is some hear-say told to you as fact by a math teacher in primary school which you haven't bothered to look into before passing on.

This entire page contains no useful information.

Anonymous - January 3, 2009 at 4:16 PM

This is garbage.
See here.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10900.pdf

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