Roman Numerals

Here's a nice article about Roman Numerals and Arithmetic.

I've always been perplexed by roman numerals. First of all, they're just weird. Why would anyone come up with something so strange as a way of writing numbers? And second, given that they're so damned weird, hard to read, hard to work with, why do we still use them for so many things today?

Most people don't realize it, but Excel has a ROMAN function that converts a value into Roman numerals.