Roman Numerals

 

Today’s thoughts will be on the short side as I am getting ready to fly home from Sydney, Australia. Today, I explored a part of Sydney that was new to me. I found the courthouse in Darlinghurst, on Oxford street. 

As I looked at two of the buildings, I realized that they has]d the year of construction marked in Roman numerals. It took myself and my travel companion several minutes to determine the values. We are both pretty good up to 100 but a bit shakier with 500 and 1000.

Although we introduce students to Roman Numerals, we really don’t do much with then to place then in some sort of context. For instance, do we work with the history teacher when they are exposing students to Ancient Rome. This would provide them with a bit more context and students could see how they were used.

We could show a clip of a movie that shows the year of publication. I have not checked recently but several years ago you’d see the dates like MDCCCCLII. I don’t know if students have ever caught that. I noticed it and tried to figure out the year. In addition, some clock faces Wes done in Roman numerals but I am not sure how many now are done in this way.

The other place, I regularly see Roman numerals used is on buildings that have been around a while. As mentioned earlier, I saw them on a court building. 

As you can see 1884 and 1888 are the dates on these buildings. I have no idea why they used roman numerals but it may be either tradition, or they thought it made buildings look more official. Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear.