Mr. V's Webpage:
Activity: Mixing the History With the Math
The number or concept of zero wasn't invented until around 300 A.D. Before then, when people wrote using positional notation,
they likely used a space where we would use zero.
So, when in the Bible, James says Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights, if someone had copied the numeric "40"
instead of "forty", if they used a positional numberic system, they would have written 4_ days and 4_ nights. What other numbers
from history would be different than how we would write them today, if still written with today's positional notation?
Back then, they were likely written with Roman numerals or other non-positional number system, but in the following activity
we will try to relate historical numbers to contemporary notation while still respecting historical views about zero. For the
activity, assume alphanumeric notation, excluding zero by replacing zero with an underscore.