XLIX

I rarely watch any sports... but I decided to checkout the latest Super Bowl. XLIX.. at least some of it. I watched Katy Perry (and others) great performance on the half time. Wow, how do you turn the football field in such great stage of 3D stuff and change so fast. How does Katy Perry's clothes change so fast? How can her eyes be so widely opened?

So I have noticed XLIX. Is that some form of Linux? No it is the Roman Numeral. I remember Super Bowl 30 had an exotic title of XXX. I had some trouble interpreting XLIX at first... oh what does "L" stand for? It is 50.

So the Roman Numeral evaluates to: (50-10)+(10-1) = 49. Now that's wacky... Next year it would be Super Bowl 50 or Super Bowl L?

But No. NFL is actually not going to go "Super Bowl L". See http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/06/nfl-super-bowl-50-roman-numerals-l.

Now before you say Roman are dumb, it just isn't so obvious how to create a number system. You take the Hindu-Arabic system for granted because you're taught that way. In the old times such system does not even yet exist or known. The Romans just didn't come up with the place-value system like we use today. But I see that they want to prevent keep using I to represent 1's. Like for 4 they use IV to prevent IIII and for 9 they use IX instead of VIIII. See, using a symbol to represent 5 is quite intuitive (number of fingers you have in 1 hand). So numbers... is an human invention, and gosh, the invention of zero and negative numbers are such important milestones of mathematics.