| You know - I have heard for years that our system of numbering was 'Arabic' in origin. I was surprised to see just how closely related they are! Once I was doing some work with an Afghan gentleman beside me who was a learned guy who taught English... to himself! Apparently, he spends hours learning whatever he can - and honing his understanding and skill. Hence - he spoke English quite well to me. I saw posted on the wall a set of Pashtu numbers and asked him to help me learn them. Here's what I learned: ۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹   |
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Numbers
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2 comments:
The "Arabic" numeral system is called "Arabic" in the west because it was imported from the Middle-East to Europe. Later on, western scholars realized that the Arabic numeral system was not invented in the Middle East, but in India. So we (here I mean, Europeans and North Americans, familiar with the western digits from 0 to 9, and the decimal place) can thank the ancient Arab Scholars who imported it from India, and who added to the mathematical knowledge of the Indian scholars a great many mathematical advances of their own, and then, we should also remember to be thankful to the ancient Brahmi Scholars in India who likely invented the decimal (base ten) math system, and the way of writing it down, and the decimal point, which goes with it.
It is a fascinating subject, and one I intend to do some more reading about. We may grumble when we have to learn math in school. But imagine a world in which we still used tally-marks (one, two, three, four, and strike through each four to make groups of five) or roman numerals. Now imagine basic math, geometry, statistics, and science, done with a system like that.
W
it snowed today!
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