E. G. Richards in "Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History" mentions the church was leary of negative numbers, and Hindu-Arabic numerals. He suggests one possible reason being that most of the people who could do arithmetic with Roman numerals were clergy, and they didn't want to lose their near-monopoly.
Gerry Ashton -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Poul-Henning Kamp Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 10:45 AM To: Leap Second Discussion List; Kevin Birth Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 88, Issue 31 In message <cefc056f.7cac%[email protected]>, Kevin Birth writes: Kevin, Do you happen to know if the church actually did ban negative numbers for some period of time ? I've seen several popular references claim that the church banned negative numbers as "the devils numbers" etc, but I've not seen anything about this subject from what I'd call trustworthy sources. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
