By Jacob DeHart
A couple years ago, I decided to binge-watch a bunch of Numberphile videos. Numberphile is a YouTube channel that covers a wide range of topics in mathematics, and often I would find myself thinking of a creative way to visualize the topics they covered.
One of those videos that I stumbled across was about Cistercian numerals. I was fascinated by the idea of using a medieval number system to that could compress large numbers into a single symbol. According to the video, the Cistercian Order used this system to record large numbers in their manuscripts, many times using them to represent dates.
I thought this would be a great system to experiment with, and I went ahead and registred cistercian.date to host the project.
As with many projects, I bought the domain with the intention of immediately working on it, and didn't touch it for almost two years. With my recent personal mass migration of domains names away from Squarespace (Thanks Google), I was reminded about the idea and spent a few lunch breaks hacking away at this site.
I'm not the first person to have come up with this idea, but I hope you enjoy my implementation of cistercian numerals using Javascript. The entire source code for this site is available on GitHub.
The Cistercian numeral system is remarkably efficient: it can represent any number from 0 to 9,999 using a single symbol. Each glyph is built around a vertical line, with additional marks added to represent different values.
The system divides the vertical line into four quadrants: the right and left sides of both the top and bottom. Each quadrant represents a different place value:
For example, the number 1,234 would be written as a single symbol combining the marks for 1000, 200, 30, and 4 in their respective quadrants.
Use the table below to build your own Cistercian numeral. Combine numbers from each column to create a single symbol.