Football is good for something – in this case, making fun of Roman numerals

As we all know, the New England Patriots are going to be playing Sunday in Super Bowl 111100.

No, wait, that’s Base 2. Wrong notation.

I mean Super Bowl 0x3C.

No, darn it, wrong again. That’s Base 16.

Super Bowl 0.0006 Lahk? No, that’s India’s numbering system. Super Bowl Threescore? No, that’s a mangled Gettysburg Address. Super Bowl Sexagenery? No, that’s East Asian calendar terminology.

Aha, I remember! It’s Super Bowl LX, using those oh-so-classy Roman Numerals.

Aside from giving us a chance to marvel at the variety of humans have devised to calibrate quantities, this listing is a reminder that using Roman numerals in the modern era is pretty weird, because it is one of the goofiest number systems ever developed. With its fixed value for symbols regardless of position, lack of a zero and casual switching between symbols adding to or subtracting from each other, it’s more like a Sudoku puzzle than an information system.

This is a system that adds one to LXXXIX and gets XC. No, thanks.

Math classes love to rag on Roman numerals because it’s almost impossible to do arithmetic with them. Even adding is clumsy, while division is pretty much impossible.

I did my share of ragging back in the day but I admit that criticism is kind of unfair, because the system wasn’t designed for doing much in way of arithmetic – that’s what the abacus was for. Roman numerals were designed to permanently record values, preferably in marble atop a Corinthian column.

The Romans didn’t mind the systems’ clumsiness because they weren’t into abstract or advanced math, anyway, not like the Greeks or Persians or Chinese. They were builders and warriors, content to create amazing things using fairly basic arithmetic. They left wrestling with infinities to folks like Zeno the Geek of Achilles-and-the-tortoise fame, and were content to have a system in which M for 1,000 was the biggest unit.

Since 1,000 is about the biggest number that football teams need, to track the yards for Barry Sanders’ or Mike Evans’ seasons, it’s appropriate that the NFL adopted Roman numerals after buying out the upstart AFL and creating a championship game

They did it, I assume, to give the new contest a patina of respectability. Judging from the way the Super Bowl has taken over American culture, they have succeeded. Eat your heart out, NBA.

Personally, the only time I need to know Roman numerals is when deciphering what year a movie made by reading the copyright message as it flashes by at the end. “Let’ see, MCMLVIII is 1000 and, uh, 1000-minus-900, and a 50 and a 5 and was that two or three 1s? So it’s, uh, 19, uh, 1950, uh 1957. I think. “

As I said, a very goofy system.