1999 Brings a Classical Question in the Arena of Numbers By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 31, 1998; Page A1 With anxious eyes fixed on the approaching millennium, many members of the public seem to have missed a serious problem facing them this very night.
Sneaking up for numerous centuries ever since the ancient Romans left things so fuzzy the dilemma is as follows:
Does tomorrow begin the year MCMXCIX?
Or MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII?
Or MCMXCVIIII?
Or MIM?
The sticky issue, how to render 1999 in Roman numerals, has been raised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology the old Bureau of Standards which, among other things, is the arbiter of cosmic queries: How long is a second? When does the next century begin? Etc. Etc.
As this dire moment approached, the institute began receiving questions about what it calls "the Year 1999 Problem," and its researchers began scratching their heads.
What should be the answer?
And who the heck cares about Roman numerals?
More people, it turns out, than you might think.
Architects. Movie producers. Kings. Popes. Officials of the Olympics, certain newspapers and the Super Bowl. Families in which males pass their names to their sons. Even computer chip makers: Intel's Pentium II processor might soon become a III, a V or a X.
To be sure, ever since the Vandals and Visigoths started the empire and its numerals down the road to ruin, demand over the centuries for the "exes," "vees" and "eyes" of the emperors has flagged.
Take architecture. Recently, the cornerstone, the traditional venue for a building's date in Roman numerals, has become as antique as Aurelius.
"Cornerstones are kind of a thing of the past," said Charles Clements, an architect with the Washington office of the Gensler design and architectural firm. "They're used in some of the older, more civic kind of buildings. But in general they're not used. They cost money. And generally developers and owners don't want to spend money on that."
In the movie industry, many studios have turned to the use of Arabic numbers in listing the copyright date at the end of the credits.
Some, though, retain Roman numerals, challenging audiences to decipher the date before it rolls past and the lights come up.
Many of Disney's Touchstone pictures, for example, still bear copyright dates in Roman numerals, while films from Columbia and Universal often do not.
"It's not like some written rule," said Merle Madden, an assistant to Disney's vice president for credit and title administration. "It's a tradition, I suppose. It's just basically done for fun and has been passed down."
The Roman digits, though, can be tricky. Recently, Disney had to recall a promo for the cartoon movie "Hercules," which had incorrectly rendered in Roman numerals the year of its arrival, according to Kathy Wallace, of Disney corporate communications.
Probably born before the 3rd century B.C., perhaps from people using their fingers to count, the system spread with the Roman Empire, long outliving the emperors, until it was gradually supplanted by the modern Arabic numerals around the 16th century.
It was a decent system, as far as it went, experts say.
"The Romans were such great builders and historians, they wanted to stamp the date on things," said Paul Lewis, a British book collector who has done a study of Roman numerals to help decipher old publishing dates. But their system was "not much use for arithmetic."
Joseph O'Connor, head of the classics department at Georgetown University, joked: "I don't know how they built all those roads."
For one thing, the Romans never came up with a figure for zero a problem solved later by Arab mathematicians.
But the main trouble was that the Roman system made for very long numbers, no doubt bloodying stone carvers of its day. Thus, shortcuts, or what some experts call contractions, came into use.
The most difficult of these is the so-called subtraction principle, in which a theoretically long Roman numeral is shortened to manageable breadth.
The number 9, for example, which technically might be VIIII V for 5, plus IIII for 4 is shortened to IX 10, or X, minus I.
Similarly, the Roman numeral for 4, technically IIII, can also be written IV, 5 minus 1.
And therein lies the source of the Year 1999 Problem.
The Romans, and many other ancients, were not consistent in how they used the subtraction principle.
Most observers believe the correct 1999 rendering is MCMXCIX: M stands for 1000; C for 100, subtracted from the second M, equaling 900; X for 10, subtracted from the second C, equaling 90; and I for 1, subtracted from the second X, equaling 9.
Total purists, though, might opt for MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII, which uses no subtraction: M equals 1000; D equals 500; CCCC equals 400; L equals 50; XXXX equals 40; V equals 5; and IIII equals 4. Total: 1999.
Partial purists can go for MCMXCVIIII, a combination of the two.
And for the ultimate subtractors, there's the racy MIM: M for 1000; the I subtracting 1 from the second M, for 1999.
"Theoretically," said George W. Houston, chairman of the classics department at the University of North Carolina and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, MIM might fly.
"There could well be debate," he said, but "I don't think the Romans would do that."
Marietta Nelson, the national standards researcher who first noted the problem at the institute, wrote that the Romans themselves seldom used subtraction, which is a convenience popularized in the present century.
But Lewis, the London book collector, said ruins of the Roman Colosseum depict the subtracted numeral XL 50 minus 10 standing for 40.
The institute says that MCMXCIX is "favored," but the rules are not written in stone, so to speak. Said spokesman Michael E. Newman: "It's one of those quirky things."
However it turns out, this trouble will be short-lived.
The year 2000 in Roman numerals is blessedly simple:
MM.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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