Ancient Greek Numbers

I’m in the middle of one of those spiffy moments that happen so nicely on the Internet.

I was perusing the headlines on The Agonist, Sean-Paul Kelley’s site that lately has turned into one of the more popular warblogs. The site name, explained in Why Agonist? (page no longer exists), comes from Ancient Greek theater.

Sean-Paul’s war missives have been labelled consecutively using Roman numerals; it’s up to LVII as of this writing. What struck me as I loaded the page just now: “Why isn’t he using Ancient Greek numbers?” This was followed instantly by: “What are Ancient Greek numbers?” Google to the rescue!

According to this article on Greek numbers, there wasn’t only one system, but rather several, and each further slightly mutated depending on the island state. A fascinating read for those of either the historical or mathematical bent, of which I am both.

There is also Links to Information on Number Systems, if you’re interested in investigating the myriad ways humans have kept count.