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c. 20,000 BC — Nile Valley, Ishango Bone: suggested, though disputed, as the earliest reference to prime numbers as also a common number. [1]c. 3400 BC — the Sumerians invent the first so-known numeral system, [dubious – discuss] and a system of weights and measures.
Number systems have progressed from the use of fingers and tally marks, perhaps more than 40,000 years ago, to the use of sets of glyphs able to represent any conceivable number efficiently. The earliest known unambiguous notations for numbers emerged in Mesopotamia about 5000 or 6000 years ago.
Telephone numbers were first used in 1879 in Lowell, Massachusetts, when they replaced the request for subscriber names by callers connecting to the switchboard operator. [2] Over the course of telephone history , telephone numbers had various lengths and formats and even included most letters of the alphabet in leading positions when telephone ...
At the same time, the Chinese were indicating negative numbers by drawing a diagonal stroke through the right-most non-zero digit of the corresponding positive number's numeral. [18] The first use of negative numbers in a European work was by Nicolas Chuquet during the 15th century.
c. 300 BC – Indian mathematician Pingala writes the Chhandah-shastra, which contains the first Indian use of zero as a digit (indicated by a dot) and also presents a description of a binary numeral system, along with the first use of Fibonacci numbers and Pascal's triangle. 280 BC – 210 BC – Greece, Nicomedes (mathematician)
Instead of a zero sometimes the digits were marked with dots to indicate their significance, or a space was used as a placeholder. The first widely acknowledged use of zero was in 876. [2] The original numerals were very similar to the modern ones, even down to the glyphs used to represent digits. [1] The digits of the Maya numeral system
Chinese mathematics made early contributions, including a place value system and the first use of negative numbers. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via ...
As a discipline, the first to adopt Arabic numerals as part of their own writings were astronomers and astrologists, evidenced from manuscripts surviving from mid-12th-century Bavaria. Reinher of Paderborn (1140–1190) used the numerals in his calendrical tables to calculate the dates of Easter more easily in his text Computus emendatus .