Whilst looking through Bradford's Crossword Lists I noticed that the
entry for Roman Numerals included an equivalent for nearly every
letter of the alphabet. In addition to the usual IVXLCDM it had ones
like B=300, E=250 and S=7 or 70.

A web search didn't seem to turn up anything (apart from hundreds of
Roman<->Arabic converters) so I guess they are some sort of pseudo
Roman numbers?

Can anyone shed some light on them, and where they are used?

"There are indeed indications that the Romans on rare occasions used
letters for the expression of integral numbers. Theodor Mommsen and
others discovered in manuscripts found in Bern, Einsiedeln, and Vienna
instances of numbers denoted by letters. Tartaglia gives in his
_General trattato di numeri_, Part I (1556), folios 4, 5, the
following:

On 8 Nov 2006 12:03:26 -0800, "Peter T. Daniels"
grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:

"There are indeed indications that the Romans on rare occasions used
letters for the expression of integral numbers. Theodor Mommsen and
others discovered in manuscripts found in Bern, Einsiedeln, and
Vienna
instances of numbers denoted by letters. Tartaglia gives in his
_General trattato di numeri_, Part I (1556), folios 4, 5, the
following:

Thank you for the reply. Your list is more or less the same as the
one in Bradford's (K and S differ).

All seems a bit obscure though - I wonder if any crossword compiler
would dare to use them

On 8 Nov 2006 12:03:26 -0800, "Peter T. Daniels"
grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:

"There are indeed indications that the Romans on rare occasions used
letters for the expression of integral numbers. Theodor Mommsen and
others discovered in manuscripts found in Bern, Einsiedeln, and Vienna
instances of numbers denoted by letters. Tartaglia gives in his
_General trattato di numeri_, Part I (1556), folios 4, 5, the
following:

Thank you for the reply. Your list is more or less the same as the
one in Bradford's (K and S differ).

All seems a bit obscure though - I wonder if any crossword compiler
would dare to use them

There's a footnote that something called "Standard Dictionary of
English" in 1896 listed S = 7 or 70. The inclusion of K in the list is
very strange anyway, since it would have had no place in the Latin of
1556. But on the whole, it's very unlikely that the list reflects
anything but Tartaglia's imagination (whoever that is). It probably got
into the English dictionaries from Cajori.

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

There's a footnote that something called "Standard Dictionary of
English" in 1896 listed S = 7 or 70. The inclusion of K in the list is
very strange anyway, since it would have had no place in the Latin of
1556. But on the whole, it's very unlikely that the list reflects
anything but Tartaglia's imagination (whoever that is). It probably got
into the English dictionaries from Cajori.


Re "Tartaglia": There was a 16th-century mathematician by that name. He
was one of the leaders in the battle to discover how to solve arbitrary
polynomial equations. (The record of his acutal accomplishments is a
bit unclear. In those days, fame as a mathemetician was achieved by
keeping one's methods secret [in order to out-calculate one's
opponents], rather that the current practice of "publish or perish".)

I'd guess, without any certainty, that it's the same person.