yeah they changed the appearance of the number symbols a little bit, but i would say the real genius in the system is that it’s a place-value system and that each digit is valued 10 times more than the one after it. that’s the core of the system, the rest is just a make-up appearance.
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marcos@lemmy.world 11 hours agoKinda. The Arabians changed them a little bit. It’s more correct to say the system was developed by both people exchanging ideas, but the vast majority of it in India.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours ago
marcos@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yes, technically putting a “0” instead of letting the place empty is included in “changing the appearance a little bit”, but your comment pre-edit undersells the innovation.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours ago
i thought the indians already put a dot in place to denote zero?
From the wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_system
Indian mathematicians, such as Brahmagupta in the 7th century, played a crucial role in formalizing arithmetic rules and the concept of zero, which was later refined by scholars like Al-Khwarizmi in the Islamic world.
marcos@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
On the sequence from your quote:
This system was established by the 7th century in India, but was not yet in its modern form because the use of the digit zero had not yet been widely accepted. 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.
Things were not very consistent at that time. AFAIK the most common was to leave empty spaces, but several people tried to cope with it by different methods. Also AFAIK, that dot was a mere typographic icon, to make the empty space clear, but it wasn’t well accepted that you should actually put something there.
xx3rawr@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
That’s why I learned them as Hindu-Arabic numerals growing up