Comment on Fuckin' PSYOP
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours agoyeah 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.
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?
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From the wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_system
marcos@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
On the sequence from your quote:
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.