Greek numerals | Hacker News Reader

Greek numerals

en.wikipedia.org

80 pointscurtis10 comments

In addition, its interesting to notice majority of Europe has different writing of 1 and 7 [1]

Coming to USA 25 years ago I and so many issues typing "1" my way and people thought it was "7". In addition, European "9" looks like small "g" because of the curly tail at the bottom.

Once I was suspended at work for 2 weeks, because they thought I used someones else SSN [clerk entered it wrong in their system]

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/62586/why-is-1-h...

Very interesting. I had a similar problem― rented a car in London, paid the congestion tax on the website where I mistakenly entered I instead of 1 for the car's plate, and ended up getting a ticket!

The worst offender to me was number "6" which is normally written here almost lying on its back, with the loop crossing downwards so that the whole thing can be easily confused with "4".

Turkish Airlines has a specific flyer they give to all their flights originating from Turkey and Europe to USA that asks people to write 1 and 7 in a specific way in the customs form. I guess that explains why.

One time I was working as a cook, and someone gave me a handwritten recipe.

I misinterpreted the 1 for a 7, and I used 7 grams of chili powder, instead of 1 gram.

1 (one) versus l (lower case L), especially in today's environment of all sorts of encoded data and alphanumeric identifiers.

I run across enough instances where context doesn't suffice to distinguish between the two (this is a word versus that is a number), that this is a noticeable problem for me.

If some of the unicode symbols aren't displaying for you and you're on a debian-based distro, I followed the advice from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters and ran

  sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts

and they display now after a full browser restart.

Neat! The article says this is still used in some modern contexts; anyone have an image of that?

Sure, you can see it here on the high school mathematics book table of contents.

https://imgur.com/BwR3ekc

And a reply by... Peter Shor of Shor's algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com