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The reception of Arabic numerals in the West was gradual and lukewarm, as other numeral systems circulated in addition to the older Roman numbers. 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.
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.
The Hindu–Arabic numeral system is a decimal place-value numeral system that uses a zero glyph as in "205". [1]Its glyphs are descended from the Indian Brahmi numerals.The full system emerged by the 8th to 9th centuries, and is first described outside India in Al-Khwarizmi's On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals (ca. 825), and second Al-Kindi's four-volume work On the Use of the Indian ...
The Hindu-Arabic system is designed for positional notation in a decimal system. In a more developed form, positional notation also uses a decimal marker (at first a mark over the ones digit but now more commonly a decimal point or a decimal comma which separates the ones place from the tenths place), and also a symbol for "these digits recur ad infinitum".
12th century — Indian numerals have been modified by Persian mathematicians al-Khwārizmī to form the modern Arabic numerals (used universally in the modern world.) 12th century — the Arabic numerals reach Europe through the Arabs. 1202 — Leonardo Fibonacci demonstrates the utility of Hindu–Arabic numeral system in his Book of the Abacus.
Despite their name, Arabic numerals have roots in India. The reason for this misnomer is Europeans saw the numerals used in an Arabic book, Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning, by Muhammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi. Al-Khwārizmī wrote several important books on the Hindu–Arabic numerals and on methods for solving equations.
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Al-Khwarizmi's work on arithmetic was responsible for introducing the Arabic numerals, based on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system developed in Indian mathematics, to the Western world. The term "algorithm" is derived from the algorism , the technique of performing arithmetic with Hindu-Arabic numerals developed by al-Khwārizmī.