Perhaps this is why there were really no Roman mathematicians. For how much they admired and emulated the Greeks, they themselves were never really able to contribute to math and science in the same way. Practically everything we think about today in western civilization in terms of Law, Architecture, Engineering, and Urban Planning comes directly from the Romans. Yet they never produced an Archimedes or a Pythagoras. Euclid remained the height of mathematical sophistication in the West through their entire reign until the rise of Arab/Islamic mathematics in the 800s.
Seems unlikely. Greeks and Romans probably did calculations in pretty much the same way, using a counting board. The early Greek way of writing numbers (look up Attic numerals) was the direct ancestor of the Roman method.
The alternative later way the Greeks (e.g. Euclid, Archimedes) wrote numbers was using their alphabet for 1–9, using separate letters for 10–90 and 100–900, then writing 1000–9000 with a “thousand” symbol plus the letter for 1–9 on top. Overall also a big pain in the butt.
