What I mean by this is that it's seems pretty easy to do it with arabic numbers. You put one of top of each other and you can add each digit etc. Same goes for multiplication, division, subtraction. However with the way roman numbers are written, it looks like you can not apply the same logic. I hope that one of you can elighten me on the subject :). PS: sorry for my poor English
Check out the FAQ section on using Roman numerals to do mathematics, as well as these two previous threads on the topic:
How did Romans do math without a decimal based number system? by /u/cespinar
How did the Romans do Math? by /u/CompactFluorescent