“Why do we have numbers?”

At face value it looks like a simple enough question. However, i believe that there are too many reasons for why we have numbers to condense into one specific answer. So the question can simply be answered by looking at our life and realising that not a day goes by where we do not encounter numbers; whether we are telling the time; counting money; or setting an alarm (so that we can nap between lectures); the list is pretty endless. In order to familiarise myself with the terminology we were going to use during the lecture I decided to turn to google where I came across a website called www.dailywritingtips.com although perhaps not an educational website it did provide me with an article called “10 rules for writing numbers and writing numbers and numerals.” Michael the author suggested:

“A number is an abstract concept while a numeral is a symbol used to express the number.”

“One could say that the difference between a number and its numeral is like the difference between a person and her name.”

For me this short and sweet statement really cleared up the difference between the two terms.

During our lecture we took a look at the numerals we use;

ARABIC NUMERALS (also known as: European, Hindu, Hindu-Arabic, Indo-Arabic)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 

However, there are other types of numerals in the world, such as;

ROMAN NUMERALS

1= I  2= II  3= III  4= IV  5= V  6= VI  7= VII  8= VIII 9= IX  10= X

CHINESE NUMERALS

http://prek-8.com/1stgrade/images/china6.jpg

MAYAN NUMERALS

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/mayan-calender-5.jpg

We began to discussing the similarities and difference of each numerical system and soon it was time for us create a system of our own. We took into consideration the repetition used in Roman Numerals and decided to do something similar this time using triangles and when forming numbers above 9 we decided to apply the same rules as our own numerical system.

Once we had shared our creation with the other groups it was time to put them into an equation and it after a couple of attempts it surprisingly became like second nature and i found myself using it confidently.

The name we gave our numerical system was SLAREMUN – numerals backwards.