Purpose of Roman Numerals?
 

I feel like having a pointless argument conversation and I started thinking of Roman numerals. As in, why do we still learn them?

Here's the best list of places we still use them I can find:
- display on analogue clocks
- the Super Bowl
- chapters in some (mostly older) books
- the year (but mostly on copyright pages and stuff that most people never read anyway)

All places where Arabic numerals could be substituted at no loss of data or even space writing.

I assume we still teach them to kids in like second grade, but why? It takes more characters to store Roman numerals except for some very specific values. You don't build anything off them, like you do with your times tables and algebra. Large numbers and decimals are so convoluted that I'm just going to leave a Wikipedia link that sort of describes them. Zero is not represented at all.

A quick Google search didn't give me anything much better than "because we can, now don't ask stupid questions," so my theory is that (1) this is most schools' solution to exposing kids to alternate ways of thinking about things, not unlike a lesson in base-2 might, and (2) people have a hard time giving up their traditions, whether or not there's a purpose in keeping them around (like writing in cursive).

What's you peoples' thoughts on this?

To find out the the year old films were copyrighted and which Rocky movie you're watching.

I'm pretty sure Roman numerals are kept around for traditional purposes, and they're still taught because a fair deal of modern material (mostly titles and dates) use them.

They aren't even that hard to learn, I don't get what's such a big deal about them anyways. I is 1, II is 2, V is 5, X is 10, etc. and anything with a numeral before it means however many less and a numeral after means however many after, like IV is 4 and VI is 6.
It's not like it takes a year to learn or something. I only learned about them from the Simpsons from the episode with Bart in the lion's cage.

Hehehe...

Well, how else would Final Fantasy fans count down to the end of that series?

As a Greek supporter I couldn't stand roman numerals and I can't remember a time when I thought they were actually useful. But since I speak Italian and living in Italy is like my dream I had to at least get used to them because they'll surely be all over the area near Rome. The whole thing behind roman numerals is that it's just addition, just like tally marks. The most I use them for is music theory, like the I IV V I chord progression. But even then I prefer to say "dominant chord" than "V chord."

Roman numerals look neater because they're composed of mostly straight lines (easy to etch into stone) while the arabic numerals are all curvy and don't have as much symmetry. Roman numerals are associated with the architecture of the time while Arabic numerals are based off of scribbles http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...numerals_2.jpg