I am teaching a history of mathematics class this semester. We are beginning with a brief discussion of ancient number systems: Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan, Chinese, Incan, Greek, Roman, and Hindu-Arabic. As I was writing up the first homework assignment it occured to me that I should investigate whether these numbers could be typeset using LaTeX.

It quickly became apparent that, because fonts are involved, I would have to use XeTeX rather than LaTeX. It was a fun (although time consuming) exercise. In the end I was able to typeset Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, and Chinese rod numerals. Because the syntax was often messy, I spent a while burying the complicated TeX in the headers so that the numbers would be easy to work with in the document.

For example, to generate the Egyptian hieroglyphics for 123 I write

\Ehun\Eten\Eten\Eone\Eone\Eone.

The fraction 1/123 is

\Efrac{\Ehun\Eten\Eten\Eone\Eone\Eone}.

To express 123 in cuneiform all I have to write is

\Bnum{123}.

To create a number board with the Chinese counting rods representing 123 I type

\Cnum{|x|x|x|}{\Cvone & \Chtwo & \Cvthree}.

If you would like to give this a try, download my .tex files:

egyptian.tex and egyptian.pdf

babylonian.tex and babylonian.pdf

chinese.tex and chinese.pdf

I’d love to be able to do something similar with the Mayan numbers. I tried for a while, but couldn’t get them to work.

[Update: I figured out how to generate Mayan numerals. Here’s a Tex file with all four number systems—Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, and Mayan.]

Disclaimer: I know my way around TeX pretty well, but I’m not a power user. It took me quite a while to get all this to work. I’m not sure I can offer much trouble-shooting advice if you can’t get this to work on your computer.