• Kalash
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    1 year ago

    My primaryschool maths teacher taught us roman numerals and one of the tasks we got was to write out the current year in roman numerals.

    I came up with MCMXCVIII … to which he smugly replied that it’s wrong and the romans were a lot more clever and it’s just IIMM (take 2 off 2000).

    Years later I learned that he was quite wrong about that and my answer is in fact the only correct one.

    • radix
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      61 year ago

      IIMM just looks so silly. If that were allowed, then why would the Super Bowl roman numerals be so long in the 1900s?

      (I don’t even watch football.)

    • @blackbrook@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      There is a modern normative convention but there was never an official standard, and the Roman’s usage actually had a lot of variation. Your teacher may have been right that some Romans actually wrote IIMM, but he certainly wasn’t right to claim you were wrong.