12 Facts About Roman numerals

Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages.

Use of Roman numerals continued long after the decline of the Roman Empire.

Roman numerals are essentially a decimal or "base ten" number system, but instead of place value notation the system uses a set of symbols with fixed values, including "built in" powers of ten.

Roman numerals, however, proved very persistent, remaining in common use in the West well into the 14th and 15th centuries, even in accounting and other business records.

In chemistry, Roman numerals are often used to denote the groups of the periodic table.

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In law, Roman numerals are commonly used to help organize legal codes as part of an alphanumeric outline.

In military unit designation, Roman numerals are often used to distinguish between units at different levels.

In pharmacy, Roman numerals were used with the now largely obsolete apothecaries' system of measurement: including to denote "one half" and to denote "zero".

In photography, Roman numerals are used to denote varying levels of brightness when using the Zone System.

In seismology, Roman numerals are used to designate degrees of the Mercalli intensity scale of earthquakes.

Roman numerals are sometimes used to represent the days of the week in hours-of-operation signs displayed in windows or on doors of businesses, and sometimes in railway and bus timetables.

The hours of operation signs are tables composed of two columns where the left column is the day of the week in Roman numerals and the right column is a range of hours of operation from starting time to closing time.