y means we use ten digits, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and a decimal point. In his book, Liber abbaci, Leonardo described and illustrated how to use this system. Following are some examples of the methods Leonardo used to illustrate how to use this new system:17417417417428 = 6 remainder 6 + 28 - 28 x28 202 146 3480 + 1392 4872 It is important to remember that until Leonardo introduced this system the Europeans were using the Roman Numeral system for mathematics, which was not easy to do. To understand the difficulty of the Roman Numeral System I would like to take a closer look at it. In Roman Numerals the following letters are equivalent to the corresponding numbers: I=1V=5X=10L=50C=100D=500M=1000 In using Roman Numerals the order of the letters was important. If a smaller value came before the next larger value it was subtracted, if it came after the larger value it was added. For example:XI=11 but IX=9This system as you can imagine was quite cumbersome and could be confusing when attempting to do arithmetic. Here are some examples using roman numerals in arithmetic:CLXXIM+XXVIII=CCII(174)(28)(202) OrCLXXIV-XXVIII=CXLVI(174) (28) (146)The order of the numbers in the decimal system is very important, like in the Roman Numeral System. For example 23 is very different from 32. One of the most important factors of the decimal system was the introduction of the digit zero. This is crucial to the decimal system because each digit holds a place value. The zero is necessary to get the digits into their correct places in numbers such as 2003, which has no tens and no hundreds. The Roman Numeral System had no need for zero. They would write 2003 as MMIII, omittin...
