[ghaff]

I wonder how much Roman numerals are even taught any longer. Maybe 5 years ago now I was traveling with a friend who went to a solid US suburban high school outside of a major city. Younger than me but certainly not young. And she asked me what a date written in Roman numerals was in the numbering system we normally use. I was somewhat floored.

Thinking about it though. It sort of is cultural/historical trivia. How many hours do you spend in school drilling how Roman numerals are constructed rather than teaching something else. I suppose it's nice enough for those who encounter them when traveling. But pretty far on the not-essential end of the axis.

[reaperman]

I'd say it's good to be exposed to for a short few lessons at a young age. My friends and I found endless fascination with them and enjoyed inventing our own numbering systems. It helped a lot when I had to think in other bases like binary or hexadecimal, because my perspective had been broadened by roman numerals.

But I'd say maybe not waste too much time on it. Kids will play with whatever they play with, you can lead them to water but cannot make them drink. We just happened to enjoy playing with number systems, and it helped a lot that our school introduced us to several for us to play with initially.

[IggleSniggle]

I taught my son a senary method for similar reasons, and also because hexagons are the bestagons. 12s are quite useful not only for time telling (since they give a nice number of ways to divide an hour) but also for evenly splitting the musical octave, and for counting with flesh between knuckles on one hand.

We do base twelve in our household. It's easier to hold in my head than base thirty-six.

Edit: I was halfway joking but I'm noticing that the 12-hour clock is very elegantly conveyed using base-36 hand gestures. The "hands" of the clock bring in this case literal human hands.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senary#Finger_counting

[zelphirkalt]

It is certainly good to learn, that there _are_ different number systems. Such knowledge can only serve to potentially at some point spark ideas. I see roman numbers as related to a unary system for example. In computer stuff we learn about binary, octal, and hexadecimal representation too (even if they are something else to decimal system than roman numbers are to it). It will not hurt mathematical ability and thought to know such things.

[ahartmetz]

The most important use for teaching Roman numerals that I see is learning that bad abstractions (here: a number system) can be made to work, but they still suck. The solution is to find better abstractions. Maybe it inspires curiosity in how (well) modern maths works.

[Joker_vD]

> bad abstractions (here: a number system) can be made to work, but they still suck

The only really bad thing about Roman numerals is non-positionality, and it kinda follows naturally from them being merely transcriptions of the states of the 5+2-beads abacus that was popular back then. If only the norm back then were the 10-beads abacus... alas, the history is what it is.

[pharrington]

The USA will stop teaching Roman numerals when we stop celebrating the yearly Super Bowl. No time soon.

[never_inline]

India. was taught roman numerals upto 1000 in elementary school math, 5th grade or so. Quickly forgot.

[ummonk]

Indian numbers seem almost as messy as Roman numerals though.

Verbally, the system seems to go thousand -> lakh -> crore -> thousand crore -> lakh crore, but then stop there, rarely extending to crore crore or inducting any farther.

Meanwhile commas don't seem to follow the verbal convention - instead showing up every two digits even after a crore, so a thousand crore looks more like ten hundred crore, and a lakh crore looks more like ten hundred hundred crore.

[never_inline]

> Verbally, the system seems to go thousand -> lakh -> crore -> thousand crore -> lakh crore

Most people don't deal in these numbers, beyond the crores. And in sciences, exponential notation is norm anyway.

There's no way it is as messy as Roman numerals.

[intelkishan]

Crore is followed by 'Arab', not a thousand crore. The system also goes beyond 'Arab' but you won't normally encounter the higher terms.

[kypro]

My GF works in schools here in the UK. According to her a lot of kids can't read analogue clocks any more because they all check the time on their phones.

In her opinion it's probably partly related to Covid too because although they do still teach it in school (at least here in the UK), there's a cohort of kids who missed a lot of basic stuff like this during lockdowns. So I think here in the UK kids around the age of 11-12 really struggle with this specifically because roman numerals and analogue clocks is something they typically would learn around the age of 7-8.

[t-3]

I don't know about now, but ~25 years ago when I was in kindergarten one the things they focused on teaching was telling time and reading clocks, which came with reading Roman numerals.

[ghaff]

Reading analog clocks was a pretty basic life skill, even for a young kid back then. To which, as you say, Roman numerals were often at least an adjunct. (Having said that I have no idea when I learned Roman numerals.)

[rsynnott]

Hrm, _are_ they actually taught rigorously somewhere? I mean, I assume you’d be exposed to them if you studied Latin, and I vaguely remember them being used as an example of a non-positional number system in maths, but other than that my only real exposure to them was the BBC (BBC TV shows used to show the date they were produced in Roman numerals, for reasons I was never particularly clear on.)

[djur]

I was taught about Roman numerals in school (mid-90s) but it was a brief thing, maybe a few homework assignments in a larger unit about Roman history. Certainly not hours of drilling. I can read a clock fine, and I can read a date if I spend some time thinking it through. But it's not really a life skill.

[ghaff]

Not remembering the details, but learning it in the 70s or so, I can look at a Roman date and not immediately grasp the year in terms I'm more familiar with but I can decode it in 10 seconds or so. I assume there was a fair bit of drilling if I remember after all this time. But then I had a couple years of Latin too.

[bityard]

I don't think they are taught widely, but that's because their use is fairly niche and they are easy to learn in any case. There are lots of fields where you not get by easily without knowing them or at least figuring them out for yourself. Historians and lawyers come to mind, for example.

[eru]

Well, not everything needs to be taught in school.

[coffeebeqn]

I was “taught” them in history class I think but I can hardly make sense of anything beyond 100

[Symbiote]

In Britain the end credits for BBC programmes would finish with the final line:

    © BBC MCMXCVI

I can generally figure them out before the line has hit the top of the screen. Of course, it was much easier a few years later:

    © BBC MM

or now

    © BBC MMXXIV

[crq-yml]

Hollywood used to use a Roman copyright year as well. The rumor I heard was that it was intended to obfuscate the time of production so that audiences would think they are seeing new work.

[JdeBP]

Having been amused by the headlined tiny factlet about clock faces when I was a child, I observe that the pseudish BBC copyright declaration system is, apart from the odd regnal number in law citations and apart from 19th century hymnals, pretty much my only significant exposure to Roman numerals through my entire life.

The last time I even saw a clock face with Roman numerals, it was when clearing the house of a person who had died.

The HHGTTG in the 1980s was sarcastic about digital watches being thought a pretty neat idea by humans, but they have definitely caught on. I have three clocks within view right now as I type this, one on an answer 'phone, and they are all digital readouts. None of them has an analogue option.

Fun fact: The pseudish BBC copyright declaration system did not begin until the middle 1970s. Before then, copyright years were in Indian numerals. In contrast to all of the earlier discussion on this page about the age and length of the Roman Empire, this particular practice post-dates the U.K.'s accession into the EEC and the U.K.'s conversion to decimal coinage.

Another fun fact: It isn't solely the BBC, in fairness. ITV companies did this back then, too. Granada's Crown Court has Roman numerals in the copyright year in its end credits, for just one example.

   GRANADA
   Colour Production
   © Granada UK MCMLXXVIII

[stevekemp]

I collect watches, and I have examples of various types (diver, pilot, etc, etc). The only thing I don't have is any watch with Roman Numerals, I don't like the way they look.

That said I have a bunch of analog clocks around my flat, and zero digital ones. It's actually been kinda fun watching our child learn to tell the time:

With an analog clock he pretty quickly understood the idea that one rotation of the seconds-hand meant a minute moved, and when the minute hand went all the way round the clock it was another hour.

But digital time? He didn't understand how something went from 19:59 to 20:00, for example. So he'd always say "Daddy what the clock is?"

(Finnish is is native tongue, he speaks to me in English, but some of the phrasing is obviously "I translated this in my head".)

[gerikson]

I sometimes use a digital wristwatch just to mix things up and I have a tough time sometimes translating how long to wait for pasta to cook - on an analog face, 11 minutes is easy to represent visually, but with a digital I have to do math in my head.

[stevekemp]

I have one digital watch, the Casio F-91W, along with a mechanical "jump hand" watch, which shows the time using a pair of rotating wheels which have digits written on them. Kinda cute, but also a little hard to read in low-light.

I admit I've used the rotating bezel of a diving-watch to time cooking more often than for timing dives. They're very practical for that!

[JdeBP]

You need a microwave oven like mine, with the apparently-by-design feature (mentioned as an aside in a Technology Connections video some years ago, as I recall) that one can program the seconds up to 99. 11 minutes is 10:60 . (-:

[swores]

> I have three clocks within view right now as I type this, one on an answer 'phone, and they are all digital readouts. None of them has an analogue option.

It is at least simple to have an analogue clock face on iPhones, albeit with a digital one too - can't resist sharing screenshot considering what my next calendar appointment happens to be... https://i.ibb.co/0JgJL0p/IMG-3479.jpg (no it doesn't take 15 minutes, but is needed once a week - it's a very old clock.)

[JdeBP]

None of the three clocks were iPhones. (-:

[roygbiv2]

This is the only reason I still know Roman numerals. Still do try and work out what they are if I get that far into the credits.

[vram22]

1996, 2000 and 2024.