From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2007 - 04:48:01 CDT
On 20 Jun 2007, at 04:00, JFC Morfin wrote:
>>>> how do I write it in Greek or Arab characters.
>>>
>>> Hans Aberg has replied:
>>>> it seems that you somehow want to get hold of 26 Greek or Arab
>>>> letters to do it.
>>>
>>> Only that the Greek alphabet has less than 26 characters,
>>> and it has a tradition of using particular letters as
>>> digits.
>>
>> In the month since the first post, not much information has been
>> given.
>
> What do you want me to tell more? You perfectly describe the poblem.
> For every alphabet with more than 26 characters - which to chose
> For those with less, is there an existing or possible solution
> already devised in other cases?
It seems you are free to do whatever you want, as their likely is no
standard usage :-). With Latin letters, for various n-base, one just
add the first n - 10 letters to the digits 0-9. I think GMP <http://
gmplib.org/> has some support for it. The ancient Greek used a
different system; perhaps it was to use the first nine letters for
1-9, the next nine for 10-90, the next nine for 100-900, and so on,
starting over from the beginning whenever needed. The Babylonians and
some Indians of America used base 60, I think. So there is nothing
particular with base 36 from the historical point of view. I do not
know why it is used in modern times. And others say hexadecimal
numbers are not localized, making it unclear why one should do it
with other n-base. There is a strong mathematical tradition to only
use Latin and Greek letters, with a few exceptions. So math generally
isn't localized, I think, in modern usage, at least not at the pro
(technical) level.
Hans Aberg
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