Of Time, Space, and Other Things

Part II Of Other Things 12. Nothing Counts

In the previous chapter, I spoke of a variety of things; among them, Roman numerals. These seem, even after five centuries of obsolescence, to exert a peculiar fascination over the inquiring mind.

It is my theory that the reason for this is that Roman numerals appeal to the ego. When one passes a corner stone which says: "Erected MCMXVIII," it gives one a sensation of power to say, "Ah, yes, nineteen eighteen" to one's self. Whatever the reason, they are worth further discussion.

The notion of number and of counting, as well as the names of the smaller and more-often-used numbers, date back to prehistoric times and I don't believe that there is a tribe of human beings on Earth today, however primitive, that does not have some notion of number.

With the invention of writing (a step which marks the boundary line between "prehistoric" and "historic"), the next step had to be taken-numbers had to be written.

One can, of course, easily devise written symbols for the words that represent particular numbers, as easily as for any other word. In English we can write the number of fingers on one hand as "five" and the number of digits on all four limbs as "twenty."

Early in the game, however, the kings' tax-collectors, chroniclers, and scribes saw that numbers bad t-he pe culiarity of being ordered. There was one set way of count ing numbers and any number could be defined by counting up to it. Therefore why not make marks which need be counted up to the proper number.

Thus, if we let "one" be represented as ' and "two" as and "three" as "', we can then work out the number indicated by a given symbol without trouble. You can see, for instance, that the symbol stands for "twenty-three." What's more, such a symbol is universal.

Whatever language you count in, the symbol stands for the number "twenty-three" in whatever sound your par ticular language uses to represent it.

It gets hard to read too many marks in an unbroken row, so it is only natural to break it up into smaller groups. If we are used to counting on the fingers of one hand, it seems natural to break up the marks into groups of five.

"Twenty-three" then becomes "' @" 'if" [email protected] "f. If we are more sophisticated and use both hands in counting, we would write it fl"pttflf '//. If we go barefoot and use our toes, too, we might break numbers into twenties.

All three methods of breaking up number symbols into more easily handled groups have left their mark on the various number systems of mankind, but the favorite was division into ten. Twenty symbols in one group are, on the whole, too many for easy grasping, while five symbols in one group produce too many groups as numbers grow larger. Division into ten is the happy compromise.

It seems a natural thought to go on to indicate groups of ten by a separate mark. There is no reason to insist on writing out a group of ten as Ifillittif every time, when a separate mark, let us say -, can be used for the purpose.

In that case "twenty-three" could be written as - "'.

Once you've started this way, the next steps are clear.

By the time you have ten groups of ten (a hundred), you can introduce another symbol, for instance +. Ten hun dreds, or a thousand, can become = and so on. In that case, the number "four thousand six hundred seventy-five" can be written - ++++++

To make such a set of symbols more easily graspable, we can take advantage of the ability of the eye to form a pattern. (You know how you can tell the numbers displayed by a pack of cards or a pair of dice by the pattern itself.)

We could therefore write "four thousand six hundred sev enty-five" as

And, as a matter of fact, the ancient Babylonians used just this system of writing numbers, but they used cunei form wedges to express it.

The Greeks, in the earlier stages of their development, used a system similar to that of the Babylonians, but in later times an alternate method grew popular. They made use of another ordered system-that of the letters of the alphabet.

It is natural to correlate the alphabet and the number system. We are taught both about the same time in child hood, and the two ordered systems of objects naturally tend to match up. The series "ay, bee, see, dee..." comes as glibly as "one, two, three, four..." and there is no dif ficulty in substituting one for the other.

If we use undifferentiated symbols such as '" for ggseven," all the components of the symbol are identical. and all must be included without exception if. the symbol is to mean "seven" and nothing else. On the other hand, if "A,BCDEFG" stands for "seven" (count the letters and see) then, since each symbol is different, only the last need be written. You can't confuse the fact that G is the seventh letter of the alphabet and therefore stands for "seven." In this way, a one-component symbol does the work of a seven-component symbol. Furthermore, " (six) looks very much like "' (seven); whereas F (six) looks n6th ing at all like G (seven).

The Greeks used their own alphabet, of course, but let's use our own alphabet here for the complete demonstration:

A = one, B = two, C = three, D = four, E Five, F six, G = seven, H = eight, I = nine, and J = ten.

We could let the letter K go on to equal "eleven," but at that rate our alphabet will only help us up through "twenty-six." The Greeks had a better system. The Baby lonian notion of groups of ten had left its mark. If J ten, then J equals not only ten objects but also one group of tens. Why not, then, continue the next letters as numbering groups of tens?

In other words J = ten, K twenty, L = thirty, M = forty, N = fifty, 0 = sixty, P seventy, Q = eighty, R = ninety. Then we can go on to number groups of hundreds:

S one hundred, T = two hundred, U = three hundred,

V four hundred, W = five hundred, X = six hundred,

Y seven hundred, Z = eight hundred. It would be con venient to go on to nine hundred, but we have run out of letters. However, in old-fashioned alphabets the amper sand ( amp;) was sometimes placed at the end of the alphabet, so we can say that amp; = nine hundred.

The first nine letters, in other words, represent the units from one to nine, the second nine letters represent the tens groups from one to nine, the third nine letters represent the hundreds groups from one to nine. (The Greek alpha bet, in classic times, had only twenty-four letters where twenty-seven are needed, so the Greeks made use of three archaic letters to fill out the list.)

This system possesses its advantages and disadvantages over the Babylonian system. One advantage is that any number under a thousand can be given in three symbols.

For instance, by the system I have just set up with our alphabet, six hundred seventy-five is XPE, while eight hun dred sixteen is ZJF.

One disadvantage of the Greek system, however, is that the significance of twenty-seven different symbols must be carefully memorized for the use of numbers to a thousand, whereas in the Babylonian system only three different sym bols must be memorized.

Furthermore, the Greek system cofnes to a natural end when the letters of the alphabet are used up. Nine hun dred ninety-nine ( amp;RI) is the largest number that can be written without introducing special markings to indicate that a particular symbol indicates groups of thousands, tens of thousands, and so on. I will get back to this later.

A rather subtle disadvantage of the Greek system was that the same symbols were used for numbers and words so that the mind could be easily distracted. For instance, the Jews of Graeco-Roman times adopted the Greek sys tem of representing numbers but, of course, used the He brew alphabet-and promptly ran into a difficulty. The number "fifteen" would naturally be written as "ten-five."

In the Hebrew alphabet, however, "ten-five" represents a short version of the ineffable name of the Lord, and the Jews, uneasy at the sacrilege, allowed "fifteen" to be repre sented as "nine-six" instead.

Worse yet, words in the Greek-Hebrew system look like numbers. For instance, to use our own alphabet, WRA is "five hundred ninety-one." In the alphabet system it doesn't usually matter in which order we place the symbols though, as we shall see, this came to be untrue for the Roman numerals, which are alphabetic, and WAR also means "five hundred ninety-one." (After all, we can say "five hundred one-and-ninty" if we wish.) Consequently, it is easy to be lieve that there is something warlike, martial, and of omi nous import in the number "five hundred ninety-one."

The Jews, poring over every syllable of the Bible in their effort to copy the word of the Lord with the exactness that reverence required, saw numbers in all the words, and in New Testament times a whole system of mysticism rose over the numerical interrelationships within the Bible. This was the nearest the Jews came to mathematics, and they called this numbering of words gematria, which is a distor-' tion of the Greek geometria. We now call it "numerology."

Some poor souls, even today, assign numbers to the dif ferent letters and decide which names are lucky and which unlucky, and which boy should marry which girl and so on. It is on'e of the more laughable pseudo-sciences.

In one case, a piece of gematria had repercussions in later history. This bit of gematria is to be found in "The Revelation of St. John the Divine," the last book of the New Testament-a book which is written in a mystical fashion that defies literal understanding. The reason for the lack of clarity seems quite clear to me. The author of Revelation was denouncing the Roman government and was laying himself open to a charge of treason and to sub sequent crucifixion if he made his words too clear. Conse 153 quently, he made an effort to write in such a way as to be perfectly clear to his "in-group" audience, while remaining completely meaningless to the Roman authorities.

In the thirteenth chapter he speaks of beasts of diaboli cal powers, and in the eighteenth verse he says, "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understandino, count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred three-score and six."

Clearly, this is designed not to give the pseudo-science of gematria holy sanction, but merely to serve as a guide to the actual person meant by the obscure imagery of the chapter. Revelation, as nearly as is known, was written only a few decades after the first great persecution of Chris tians under Nero. If Nero's name ("Neron Caesar") is written in Hebrew characters the sum of the numbers rep resented by the individual letters does indeed come out to be six hundred sixty-six, "the number of the beast."

Of course, other interpretations are possible. In fact, if Revelation is taken as having significance for all time as well as for the particular time in which it was written, it may also refer to some anti-Christ of the future. For this reason, generation after generation, people have made at tempts to show that, by the appropriate ju-glings of the spelling of a name in an appropriate language, and by the appropriate assignment of numbers to letters, some par ticular personal enemy could be made to possess the num ber of the beast.

If the Christians could apply it to Nero, the Jews them selves might easily have applied it in the next century to Hadrian, if they had wished. Five centuries later it could be (and was) applied to Mohammed. At the time of the Ref ormation, Catholics calculated Martin Luther's name and found it to be the number of the beast, and Protestants re turned the compliment by making the same discovery in the case of several popes.

Later still, when religious rivalries were replaced by na tionalistic ones, Napoleon Bonaparte and William 11 were appropriately worked out. What's more, a few minutes' work with my own system of alphabet-numbers shows me that "Herr Adolif Hitler" has the number of the beast. (I need that extra "I" to make it work.)

The Roman system of number symbols had similarities to both the Greek and Babylonian systems. Like the Greeks, the Romans used letters of the alphabet. However, they did not use them in order, but use just a few letters which they repeated as often as necessary-as in the Baby lonian system. Unlike the Babylonians, the Romans did not invent a new symbol for every tenfold increase of number, but (more primitively) used new symbols for fivefold increases as well.

'Thus, to begin with, the symbol for "one" is 1, and "two," "three," and "four," can be written II, III, and IIII.

The symbol for five, then, is not 11111, but V. People have amused themselves no end trying to work out the reasons for the particular letters chosen as symbols, but there are no explanations that are universally accepted.

However, it is pleasant to think that I represents the up held fin-er and that V might symbolize the hand itself with all five fingers-one branch of the V would be the out held thumb, the other, the remaining fingers. For "six," "seven," "eight," and "nine," we would then have VI, VII, 'VIII, and VIIII.

For "ten" we would then have X, which (some peo ple think) represents both hands held wrist to wrist.

"Twenty-three" would be XXIII, "forty-eight" would be XXXXVIII, and so on.

The symbol for "fifty" is L, for "one hundred" is C, for "five hundred" is D, and for "one thousand" is M. The C and M are easy to understand, for C is the first letter of centum (meaning "one hundred") and M is the first letter of rnille (one thousand).

For that very reason, however, those symbols are sus picious. As initials they may have come to oust the original less-meaningful symbols for those numbers. For instance, an alternative symbol for "thousand" looks something like this (1). Half of a thousand or "five hundred" is the right half of the symbol, or (1), and this may have been con verted into D. As for the L which stands for "fifty," I don't know why it is used.

Now, then, we can write nineteen sixty-four, in Roman numerals, as follows: MDCCCCLXIIII.

One advantage of writing numbers according to this sys tem is that it doesn't matter in which order the numbers are written. If I decided to write nineteen sixty-four as CDCLIIMXCICT, it would still represent nineteen sixty four if I add up the number values of each letter. However, it is not likely that anyone would ever scramble the letters in this fashion. If the letters were written in strict order of decreasing value, as I.did the first time, it would then be much simpler to add the values of the letters. And, in fact, this order of decreasing value is (except for special cases) always used.

Once the order of writing the letters in Roman numerals is made an established convention, one can make use of deviations from that set order if it will help simplify mat ters. For instance, suppose we decide that when a symbol of smaller value follows one of larger value, the two are added; while if the symbol of smaller value precedes one of larger value, the first is subtracted from the second. Thus VI is "five" plus "one" or "six,"' while IV is "five" minus "one" or "four." (One might even say that IIV is "three," but it is conventional to subtract no more than one sym bol.) In the same way LX is "sixty" while XL is "forty"; CX is "one hundred ten," while XC is "ninety"; MC is 44 one thousand one hundred," while CM is "nine hundred."

The value of this "subtractive principle" is that two sym bols can do the work of five. Why write VIIII il you can write IX; or DCCCC if you can write CM? The year nine teen sixty-four, instead of being written MDCCCCLXIIII (twelve symbols), can be written [email protected] (seven sym bols). On the other hand, once you make the order of writing letters significant, you can no longer scramble them even if you wanted to. For instance, if MCMLXIV is scrambled to MMCLXVI it becomes "two thousand one hundred sixty-six."

The subtractive principle was used on and off in ancient times but was not regularly adopted until the Middle Ages.

One interesting theory for the delay involves the simplest use of the principle-that of IV ("four"). These are the first letters of IVPITER, the chief of the Roman gods, and the Romans may have had a delicacy about writing even the beginning of the name. Even today, on clockfaces bear ing Roman numerals, "four" is represented as 1111 and never as IV. This is not because the clockf ace does not ac cept the subtractive principle, for "nine" is represented as IX and never as VIIII.

With the symbols already,given, we can go up to the number "four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine" in Ro man numerals. This would be MMMMDCCCCLXXXX VIIII or, if the subtractive principle is used ' MMMM CMXCIX. You might suppose that "five thousand" (the next number) could be written MMMMM, but this is not quite right. Strictly speaking, the Roman system never re quires a symbol to be repeated more than four times. A new symbol is always invented to prevent that: 11111 = V; XXXXX = L; and CCCCC = D. Well, then, what is MMMMM?

No letter was decided upon for "five thousand." In an cient times there was little need in ordinary life for num bers that high. And if scholars and tax collectors had oc casion for larger numbers, their systems did not percolate down to the common man.

One method of penetrating to "five thousand" and be yond is to use a bar to represent thousands. Thus, V would represent not "five" but "five thousand." And sixty-seven thousand four hundred eighty-two would be LX-VIICD LXXXII.

But another method of writing large numbers harks back to the primitive symbol (1) for "thousand." By adding to the curved lines we can increase the number by ratios of ten. Thus "ten thousand" would be (1)), and "one hundred thousand" would be (1) Then just as "five hundred" was 1) or D, "five thousand" would be 1)) and "fifty thousand" would be I))).

Just as the Romans made special marks to indicate tbou sands, so did the Greeks. What's more, the Greeks made special marks for ten thousands and for millions (or at least some of the Greek writers did). That the Romans didn't carry this to the logical extreme is no surprise. The Romans prided themselves on being non-intellectual. That the Greeks missed it also, however, will never cease to astonish me.

Suppose that instead of making special marks for large numbers only, one were to make special marks for every type of group from the units on. If we stick to the system I introduced at the start of the chapter-that is, the one in which ' stands for units, - for tens, + for hundreds, and = for thousands-then we could get by with but one set of nine syrrbols. We could write every number with a little heading, marking off the type of groups -+-'. Then for "two thousand five hundred eighty-one" we could get by with only the letters from A to I and write it GEHA. What's more, for "five thousand five hundred fifty-five" we could write EEEE. There would be no confusion with all the E's, since the symbol above each E would indicate that one was a "five," another a "fifty," another a "five hundred," and another a "five thousand." By using additional symbols for ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions, and so on, any number, however large, could be written in this same fashion.

Yet it is not surprising that this would not be popular.

Even if a Greek had thought of it he would have been re peucd by the necessity of writing those tiny symbols. In an age of band-copying, additional symbols meant additional labor and scribes would resent that furiously.

Of course, one might easily decide that the symbols weren't necessary. The Groups, one could agree, could al ways be written right to left in increasing values. The units would be at the right end, the tens next on the left, the hun dreds next, and so on. In that case, BEHA would be "two thousand five hundred eighty-one" and EEEE would be "five thousand five hundred fifty-five" even without the little symbols on top.

Here, though, a difficulty would creep in. What if there were no groups of ten, or perhaps no units, in a particular number? Consider the number "ten" or the number "one hundred and one." The former is made up of one group of ten and no units, while the latter is made up of one group of hundreds, no groups of tens, and ont unit. Using sym bols over the columns, the numbers could be written A and A A, but now you would not dare leave out the little sym bols. If you did, how could you differentiate A meaning "ten" from A meaning "one" or AA meaning "one hun dred and one" from AA meaning "eleven" or AA meaning "one hundred and ten"?

You might try to leave a gap so as to indicate "one hun dred and one" by A A. But then, in an age of hand-copy ing, how quickly would that become AA, or, for that mat ter, how quickly might AA become A A? Then, too, how would you indicate a gap at the end of a symbol? No, even if the Greeks thought of this system, they must obviously have come to the conclusion that the existence of gaps in numbers made this attempted simplification impractical.

They decided it was safer to let J stand for "ten" and SA for "one hundred and one" and to Hades with little sym bols.

What no Greek ever thought of-not even Archimedes himself-was that it wasn't absolutely necessary to work with gaps. One could fill the gap with a symbol by letting one stand for nothing-for "no groups." Suppose we use $ as such a symbol. Then, if "one hundred and one",is made up of one group of hundreds, no groups of tens, an one + - I unit, it can be written A$A. If we do that sort of thing, all gaps are eliminated and we don't need the little symbols on top. "One" becomes A, "ten" becomes A$, "one hun dred" becomes A$$, "one hundred and one" becomes A$A, "one hundred and ten" becomes AA$, and so on.

Any number, however large, can be written with the use of exactly nine letters plus a symbol for nothinc, Surely this is the simplest thing in the world-after you think of it.

Yet it took men about five thousand years, counting from the beginning of number symbols, to think of a sym bol for nothing. The man who succeeded (one of the most creative and original thinkers in history) is unknown. We know only that he was some Hindu who lived no later than the ninth century.

The Hindus called the symbol sunyo, meaning "empty."

This symbol for nothing was picked up by the Arabs, who termed it sifr, which in their language meant "empty." This has been distorted into our own words "cipher" and, by way of zefirum, into "zero."

Very slowly, the new svstem of numerals (called "Ara bic numerals" because the Europeans learned of them from the Arabs) reached the West and replaced the Roman sys tem.

Because the Arabic numerals came from lands which did not use the Roman alphabet, the shape of the numerals was nothing like the letters of the Roman alphabet and this was good, too. It rerroved word-number confusion and reduced gematria from the everyday occupation of anyone who could read, to a burdensome folly that only a few would wish to bother with.

The Arabic numerals as now used by us are, of course, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and the all-important 0. Such is our reliance on these numerals (which are internationally accepted) that we are not even aware of the extent to which we rely on them. For instance, if this chapter has seemed vaauely queer to you, perhaps it was because I had delib eratclv refrained from using Arz.bic numerals all through.

We ail know the great simplicity Arabic numerals have lent 'Lo arithmetical computation. The unnecessary load they took off the human mind, all because of the presence of t' e zero, is simply incalculable. Nor has this fact gone unnot.ccd in the Engl'sh language. Tle importance of the zero is reflected in the fact that when we work out an arithmetical computation we are (to use a term now slightly old-fashioned) "ciphering." And when we work out some code, we are "deciphering" it.

So if you look once more at the title of this chapter, you will see that I am not being cynical. I mean it literally.

Nothing counts! The symbol for nothing makes all the dif ference in the world.

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