When was the Arabic numeral system introduced in Europe?
Numerical digit
From India, the thriving trade between Islamic sultans and Africa carried the concept to Cairo. Arabic mathematicians extended the system to include decimal fractions, and Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Ḵwārizmī wrote an important work about it in the 9th  century. The modern Arabic numerals were introduced to Europe with the translation of this work in the 12th century in Spain and Leonardo of Pisa's "Liber Abaci" of 1201. In Europe, the complete Indian system with the zero was derived from the Arabs in the 12th century.
Arabs in Europe
The Iberian Peninsula was mapped as "Al-Andalus" by the new Muslim invaders. The Arabs, as well as the overall Muslim populations (a mix of Berbers and Arabs) of Al-Andalus and North Africa, were referred to as "Moors". Spain enjoyed a golden era of Islamic culture, accompanied by a golden age of Sephardic Jewish culture. This era spawned great Arabic polymaths and intellectuals such as Averroes and Albucasis. The Islamic rule in Spain also saw the birth of the Aljamiado alphabet, an Arabic alphabet for the Spanish language. In the 15th century, the Muslims were defeated by the Christian armies in a historical process called Reconquista (meaning reconquest in Spanish and Portuguese), which led the Christian monarchs to regain control over the Hiberian peninsula. Much of the architecture that was concocted from this era remains intact in Spain and functions as famous tourist destinations since the Catholic monarchs decided to use them rather than destroy them.
Joseph of Spain
Abraham ibn Daud and other sources credit Joseph with bringing the so-called "Arabic numerals" from India to Europe.
Arabic
During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have also borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages, mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, and Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as "". Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid-9th to mid-10th centuries. Many of these words relate to agriculture and related activities. Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have also acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish.
Eastern Arabic numerals
In North Africa (excluding Egypt and Sudan), only Western Arabic numerals are now commonly used. In medieval times, these areas used a slightly different set (from which, via Italy, Western Arabic numerals derive).
History of science
In mathematics, the mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850) gave his name to the concept of the algorithm, while the term algebra is derived from "al-jabr", the beginning of the title of one of his publications. What is now known as Arabic numerals originally came from India, but Muslim mathematicians made several key refinements to the number system, such as the introduction of decimal point notation.
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
Al-Uqlidisi developed a notation to represent decimal fractions.
The numerals came to fame due to their use in the pivotal work of the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, whose book "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" was written about 825, and the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi, who wrote four volumes (see [2]) "On the Use of the Indian Numerals" (Ketab fi Isti'mal al-'Adad al-Hindi) about 830. They, amongst other works, contributed to the diffusion of the Indian system of numeration in the Middle-East and the West.
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
Historians trace modern numerals in most languages to the Brahmi numerals, which were in use around the middle of the 3rd century BC. The place value system, however, developed later. The Brahmi numerals have been found in inscriptions in caves and on coins in regions near Pune, and Uttar Pradesh. These numerals (with slight variations) were in use up to the 4th century.
Johannes de Sacrobosco
Sacrobosco's "Algorismus" aka "De Arte Numerandi" is thought to have been his first work, and the date is estimated at about 1225, and before 1230. The Hindu–Arabic methods of numerical calculation had arrived in Latin Europe during the previous fifty years but had not been disseminated on a wide scale. Sacrobosco's "Algorismus" was the first text to introduce Hindu–Arabic numerals and procedures into the European university curriculum.
Arabs in Europe
Arabs in Europe have a history beginning with the Arab Empire, which conquered the Iberian Peninsula, including what is now Spain and Portugal, in 711 AD. Other Arabs occupied the Italian island of Sicily from 831 to 1072. Arabs were later expelled from those domains after the Reconquista and the Catholic Church's Inquisition of non-believers. There were also brief periods of independent Arab-Islamic colonization and occupation, in modern-day France, Switzerland, and Italy, using Fraxinet in the Gulf of St. Tropez as a base for raids and colonisation.
Old Arabic
Old Arabic is the earliest attested stage of the Arabic language, beginning with the first attestation of personal names in the 9th century BC, and culminating in the codification of Classical Arabic beginning in the 7th century AD. Originally the primary language of the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions, it came to be expressed primarily in a modified Nabataean script after the demise of the Nabataean Kingdom. In addition, inscriptions in Old Arabic are attested in the Dadanitic script and the Greek alphabet, the latter of which have proved indispensable in the reconstruction of the language's phonology.
Codex Vigilanus
The "Codex" contains, among other pieces of useful information, the first mention and representation of Arabic numerals (save zero) in the West. They were introduced by the Arabs into Spain around 900.
0
The Italian mathematician Fibonacci (c. 1170–1250), who grew up in North Africa and is credited with introducing the decimal system to Europe, used the term "zephyrum". This became "zefiro" in Italian, and was then contracted to "zero" in Venetian. The Italian word "" was already in existence (meaning "west wind" from Latin and Greek "zephyrus") and may have influenced the spelling when transcribing Arabic "ṣifr".
Spread of the Latin script
The Scramble for Africa (1881–1914), meaning the rapid occupation, colonisation and annexation of inland Africa by European powers, went hand in hand with the spread of literacy amongst native Africans, as the Latin script was introduced where there were other writing systems or none. Until the early 19th century, the Berber peoples in North Africa had two systems: originally Tifinagh, and, following the spread of Islam, the Arabic script as well. French colonists, particularly missionaries and army linguists, developed a Berber Latin alphabet to make communication easier, especially for the Kabyle people in French Algeria. Since no great body of Berber literature existed, and the colonisers greatly helped improve literacy rates, the romanisation received much support, more so after Algerian independence (1962) when the French-educated Kabyle intelligentsia began to stimulate the transition and especially since the establishment of a standard transcription for Kabylie in 1970. Similar French attempts to latinise the Arabic language met much more resistance, were unsuccessful and eventually abandoned.
Arabic numeral variations
There are various stylistic and typographic variations to the Arabic numeral system.
History of the Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet is first attested in its classical form in the 7th century. See PERF 558 for the first surviving Islamic Arabic writing.
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
Before the rise of the Caliphate, the Hindu–Arabic numeral system was already moving West and was mentioned in Syria in 662 AD by the Nestorian scholar Severus Sebokht who wrote the following:
Aeronautical Message Handling System
The first AMHS system was implemented by Avitech GmbH (Germany) as a pioneer solution and went into operational use in 1996 with 36 centers for the German Military (Bundeswehr) and the first AMHS connection in Europe is in operational use since February 2005 between the ANSPs of Germany and Spain. Second in Europe were Bosnia and Herzegovina with Austria in 2011. The first operational AMHS connection in the Middle East was established in 2009 between the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi) and Oman. In the meantime Abu Dhabi has evolved as a nucleus for the introduction of AMHS in the Middle East, resulting in a coherent AMHS network of operational connection between UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar. Since 2010 Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia form the first operational AMHS triangle. In 2012 the South American countries Peru and Colombia joined the circle of AMHS users while Asia has operated AMHS links between Hong Kong and Macao since 2009 and between Singapore and India since 2011.
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals were introduced to China during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) by the Muslim Hui people. In the early 17th century, European-style Arabic numerals were introduced by Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits.
0
Here Leonardo of Pisa uses the phrase "sign 0", indicating it is like a sign to do operations like addition or multiplication. From the 13th century, manuals on calculation (adding, multiplying, extracting roots, etc.) became common in Europe where they were called "algorismus" after the Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī. The most popular was written by Johannes de Sacrobosco, about 1235 and was one of the earliest scientific books to be "printed" in 1488. Until the late 15th century, Hindu–Arabic numerals seem to have predominated among mathematicians, while merchants preferred to use the Roman numerals. In the 16th century, they became commonly used in Europe.
Arabs
Other notable Arab contributions include among other things: establishing the science of chemistry by Jābir ibn Hayyān, establishing the science of cryptology and cryptanalysis by al-Kindi, the development of analytic geometry by Ibn al-Haytham, the discovery of the pulmonary circulation by Ibn al-Nafis, the discovery of the itch mite parasite by Ibn Zuhr, the first use of irrational numbers as an algebraic objects by Abū Kāmil, the first use of the positional decimal fractions by al-Uqlidisi, the development of the Arabic numerals and an early algebraic symbolism in the Maghreb, the Thabit number and Thābit theorem by Thābit ibn Qurra, the discovery of several new trigonometric identities by Ibn Yunus and al-Battani, the mathematical proof for Ceva's theorem by Ibn Hűd, the first accurate lunar model by Ibn al-Shatir, the invention of the torquetum by Jabir ibn Aflah, the invention of the universal astrolabe and the equatorium by al-Zarqali, the first description of the crankshaft by al-Jazari, the anticipation of the inertia concept by Averroes, the discovery of the physical reaction by Avempace, the identification of more than 200 new plants by Ibn al-Baitar the Arab Agricultural Revolution, and the Tabula Rogeriana, which was the most accurate world map in pre-modern times by al-Idrisi.
Arabic
Beginning in the 1st century CE, fragments of Northern Old Arabic are attested in the Nabataean script across northern Arabia. By the 4th century CE, the Nabataean Aramaic writing system had come to express varieties of Arabic other than that of the Nabataeans.
Hebrew numerals
The Greek system was adopted in Hellenistic Judaism and had been in use in Greece since about the 5th century BC.
In this system, there is no notation for zero, and the numeric values for individual letters are added together. Each unit (1, 2, ..., 9) is assigned a separate letter, each tens (10, 20, ..., 90) a separate letter, and the first four hundreds (100, 200, 300, 400) a separate letter. The later hundreds (500, 600, 700, 800 and 900) are represented by the sum of two or three letters representing the first four hundreds. To represent numbers from 1,000 to 999,999, the same letters are reused to serve as thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. Gematria (Jewish numerology) uses these transformations extensively.
Watch 1505
The widespread network of the Muslim Caliphates interconnected with the world's known trade routes, mainly the Silk Road from China to the Caliphate of Cordoba and Al-Andalusian Spain, were not only the most important trade routes but also networks of knowledge transfer. The broad network made it necessary to have primarily navigation devices, such as astrolabes, which were introduced to Europe from Muslim Spain in the early 12th century. The Andalusian mathematician and astronomer Al-Muradi wrote the technological manuscript "Kitāb al-asrār fī natā'ij al-afkār" ("The Book of Secrets in the Results of Thoughts"). The manuscript provides information about a "Castle and Gazelle Clock" and many other forms of complicated clocks and ingenious devices.
Arabic Numeral Series
The Arabic Numeral Series, sometimes referred to as the Arabics, is a series of 19 short 16mm films completed by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage in 1981 and 1982. The "Arabic Numeral Series" gets its name from the fact that none of the films included in it have titles, instead opening with an arabic numeral. Brakhage produced another cycle, the "Roman Numeral Series", whose films all have Roman numerals instead of titles, around the same time. All of the "Arabics" are silent and are intended to be projected at 18 frames per second.
Arabic numerals
In 825 Al-Khwārizmī wrote a treatise in Arabic, "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals", which survives only as the 12th-century Latin translation, "Algoritmi de numero Indorum". "Algoritmi", the translator's rendition of the author's name, gave rise to the word "algorithm".
Arithmetic
The concept of 0 as a number comparable to the other basic digits is essential to this notation, as is the concept of 0's use as a placeholder, and as is the definition of multiplication and addition with 0. The use of 0 as a placeholder and, therefore, the use of a positional notation is first attested to in the Jain text from India entitled the "Lokavibhâga", dated 458 AD and it was only in the early 13th century that these concepts, transmitted via the scholarship of the Arabic world, were introduced into Europe by Fibonacci using the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
By the end of the 7th century, decimal numbers begin to appear in inscriptions in Southeast Asia as well as in India. Some scholars hold that they appeared even earlier. A 6th century copper-plate grant at Mankani bearing the numeral 346 (corresponding to 594 CE) is often cited. But its reliability is subject to dispute. The first indisputable occurrence of 0 in an inscription occurs at Gwalior in 876 CE, containing a numeral "270" in a notation surprisingly similar to ours. Throughout the 8th and 9th centuries, both the old Brahmi numerals and the new decimal numerals were used, sometimes appearing in the same inscriptions. In some documents, a transition is seen to occur around 866 CE.
Hindu–Arabic numeral system
The "Western Arabic" numerals as they were in common use in Europe since the Baroque period have secondarily found worldwide use together with the Latin alphabet, and even significantly beyond the contemporary spread of the Latin alphabet, intruding into the writing systems in regions where other variants of the Hindu–Arabic numerals had been in use, but also in conjunction with Chinese and Japanese writing (see Chinese numerals, Japanese numerals).
Numerals in Unicode
Numerals (often called "numbers" in Unicode) are characters or sequences of characters that denote a number. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system (base-10) is used widely in various writing systems throughout the world and all share the same semantics for denoting numbers. However, the graphemes representing the numerals differ widely from one writing system to another. To support these grapheme differences, Unicode includes encodings of these numerals within many of the script blocks. The decimal digits are repeated in 22 separate blocks. In addition to many forms of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, Unicode also includes several less common numerals such as: Aegean numerals, Roman numerals, counting rod numerals, Cuneiform numerals and ancient Greek numerals. There is also a large number of typographical variations of the Arabic numerals provided for specialized mathematical use and for compatibility with earlier character sets, and also composite characters containing Arabic numerals such as ½.
Napoleonic Code
A civil code with strong Napoleonic influences was also adopted in 1864 in Romania, and remained in force until 2011. The Code was also adopted in Egypt as part of the system of mixed courts introduced in Egypt after the fall of Khedive Ismail. The Code was translated into Arabic from the French by Youssef Wahba Pasha between 1881 and 1883. Other codes with some influence in their own right were the Swiss, German, and Austrian codes, but even therein some influence of the French code can be felt, as the Napoleonic Code is considered the first successful codification.
Liber Abaci
"Liber Abaci" was among the first Western books to describe the Hindu–Arabic numeral system and to use symbols traditionally described as "Arabic numerals". By addressing the applications of both commercial tradesmen and mathematicians, it contributed to convincing the public of the superiority of the system, and the use of these glyphs.
Fibonacci
The 1228 edition, first section introduces the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and compares the system with other systems, such as Roman numerals, and methods to convert the other numeral systems into Hindu-Arabic numerals. Replacing the Roman numeral system, its ancient Egyptian multiplication method, and using an abacus for calculations, with a Hindu-Arabic numeral system was an advance in making business calculations easier and faster, which led to the growth of banking and accounting in Europe.
Classical Arabic
The A1 inscription dated to the 3rd or 4th c. AD in the Greek alphabet in a dialect showing affinities to that of the Safaitic inscriptions shows that short final high vowels had been lost in at least some dialects of Old Arabic at that time, obliterating the distinction between nominative and genitive case in the singular, leaving the accusative the only marked case:
Hindu–Arabic numeral system
In Christian Europe, the first mention and representation of Hindu-Arabic numerals (from one to nine, without zero), is in the ", an illuminated compilation of various historical documents from the Visigothic period in Spain, written in the year 976 by three monks of the Riojan monastery of San Martín de Albelda.
Between 967 and 969, Gerbert of Aurillac discovered and studied Arab science in the Catalan abbeys. Later he obtained from these places the book " ("On multiplication and division"). After becoming Pope Sylvester II in the year 999, he introduced a new model of abacus, the so-called Abacus of Gerbert, by adopting tokens representing Hindu-Arab numerals, from one to nine.
Pope Sylvester II
Gerbert learned of Hindu–Arabic digits and applied this knowledge to the abacus, but probably without the numeral zero. According to the 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury, Gerbert got the idea of the computing device of the abacus from a Spanish Arab. The abacus that Gerbert reintroduced into Europe had its length divided into 27 parts with 9 number symbols (this would exclude zero, which was represented by an empty column) and 1,000 characters in all, crafted out of animal horn by a shieldmaker of Rheims. According to his pupil Richer, Gerbert could perform speedy calculations with his abacus that were extremely difficult for people in his day to think through in using only Roman numerals. Due to Gerbert's reintroduction, the abacus became widely used in Europe once again during the 11th century.
Year zero
Neither the concept nor a symbol for zero existed in the system of Roman numerals. The Babylonian system of the BC era had used the idea of "nothingness" without considering it a number, and the Romans enumerated in much the same way. Wherever a modern zero would have been used, Bede and Dionysius Exiguus did use Latin number words, or the word "nulla" (meaning "nothing") alongside Roman numerals. Zero was invented in India in the sixth century, and was either transferred or reinvented by the Arabs by about the eighth century. The Arabic numeral for zero (0) did not enter Europe until the thirteenth century. Even then, it was known only to very few, and only entered widespread use in Europe by the seventeenth century.
Tunisian Arabic
The first successful trial to create a specific Latin script and writing method for Tunisian was the "Practical Orthography of Tunisian Arabic", created by Joseph Jourdan in 1913. Its principle was to use French consonant and vowel digraphs and phonology to transcribe non-Latin sounds. In this method, "kh" is used to
transcribe /χ/, "ch" to transcribe /ʃ/, "th" to transcribe /θ/, "gh" to transcribe /ʁ/, "dh" to transcribe /ð/ or /ðˤ/ and "ou" to transcribe /u:/, "a" to transcribe /a:/ and /ɛː/, i to transcribe /i:/ and e to transcribe the short vowels. The layout was successful because it did not involve additional Latin letters and could be transcribed efficiently. It was used in the later linguistic works of Joseph Jourdan about Tunisian Arabic until 1956. Moreover, it is still presently used in French books to transcribe Tunisian Arabic. The method was used in 1995 by the Tunisian Arabizi, an Arabic chat alphabet, converting the consonant digraphs into digits. It uses 2 to transcribe a glottal stop, 3 to transcribe /ʕ/, 5 to transcribe /χ/, 6 to transcribe /tˤ/, 7 to transcribe /ħ/, 8 to transcribe /ʁ/ and 9 to transcribe /q/. The ch, dh, and th digraphs were kept in Tunisian Arabizi. Vowels are transcribed according to their quality and not to their length as a is used to transcribe short and long [ɐ] and [æ], e is used to transcribe short and long [ɛ] and [e], u is used to transcribe short and long [y], eu is used to transcribe short and long [œ], o is used to transcribe short and long [o], ou is used to transcribe short and long [u] and i is used to transcribe short and long [i] and [ɪ]. Sometimes, users differentiate between short and long vowels by dropping short ones. Like all other Arabic chat alphabets, its use spread considerably during the 1990s mainly with the Tunisian young people. Nowadays, it is used principally on social networks and mobile phones. Also, during the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, Tunisian Arabizi was the main script used for message transmission on internet. After 2011, more interest was given to Tunisian Arabizi and in 2013, a concise grammar book about Tunisian, written with Tunisian Arabizi, was issued. In 2016, Tunisian Arabizi has been recognized by "Ethnologue" as an official informal script for writing Tunisian. However, this chat alphabet is not standardized and is seen as informal as the Arabic sounds are transcribed as numbers and letters at the same time. The use of digits as numerals and letters at the same time made transcribing Tunisian difficult to users and did not linguistically solve the matters that were faced by the Practical Transcription.
Numeral system
The most commonly used system of numerals is the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. Two Indian mathematicians are credited with developing it. Aryabhata of Kusumapura developed the place-value notation in the 5th century and a century later Brahmagupta introduced the symbol for zero. The numeral system and the zero concept, developed by the Hindus in India, slowly spread to other surrounding countries due to their commercial and military activities with India. The Arabs adopted and modified it. Even today, the Arabs call the numerals which they use "Rakam Al-Hind" or the Hindu numeral system. The Arabs translated Hindu texts on numerology and spread them to the western world due to their trade links with them. The Western world modified them and called them the Arabic numerals, as they learned them from the Arabs. Hence the current western numeral system is the modified version of the Hindu numeral system developed in India. It also exhibits a great similarity to the Sanskrit–Devanagari notation, which is still used in India and neighbouring Nepal.
Rebec
Popular from the 13th to 16th centuries, the introduction of the rebec into Western Europe coincided with the Arabic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. There is however evidence of the existence of bowed instruments in the 9th century in Eastern Europe. The Persian geographer of the 9th century Ibn Khurradadhbih cited the bowed Byzantine lira (or "lūrā") as typical bowed instrument of the Byzantines and equivalent to the Arab "rebab".
History of mathematical notation
Abū al-Hasan ibn Alī al-Qalasādī (1412–1482) was the last major medieval Arab algebraist, who improved on the algebraic notation earlier used by Ibn al-Yāsamīn in the 12th century and, in the Maghreb, by Ibn al-Banna in the 13th century. In contrast to the syncopated notations of their predecessors, Diophantus and Brahmagupta, which lacked symbols for mathematical operations, al-Qalasadi's algebraic notation was the first to have symbols for these functions and was thus "the first steps toward the introduction of algebraic symbolism." He represented mathematical symbols using characters from the Arabic alphabet.The 14th century saw the development of new mathematical concepts to investigate a wide range of problems. The two widely used arithmetic symbols are addition and subtraction, + and −. The plus sign was used by 1360 by Nicole Oresme in his work "Algorismus proportionum". It is thought an abbreviation for "et", meaning "and" in Latin, in much the same way the ampersand sign also began as "et". Oresme at the University of Paris and the Italian Giovanni di Casali independently provided graphical demonstrations of the distance covered by a body undergoing uniformly accelerated motion, asserting that the area under the line depicting the constant acceleration and represented the total distance traveled. The minus sign was used in 1489 by Johannes Widmann in "Mercantile Arithmetic" or "Behende und hüpsche Rechenung auff allen Kauffmanschafft,". Widmann used the minus symbol with the plus symbol, to indicate deficit and surplus, respectively. In "Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni e proportionalità", Luca Pacioli used symbols for plus and minus symbols and contained algebra.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
"On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" written about 820, was principally responsible for spreading the Hindu–Arabic numeral system throughout the Middle East and Europe. It was translated into Latin as "Algoritmi de numero Indorum". Al-Khwārizmī, rendered as (Latin) "Algoritmi", led to the term "algorithm".
Decimal
The Egyptian hieratic numerals, the Greek alphabet numerals, the Hebrew alphabet numerals, the Roman numerals, the Chinese numerals and early Indian Brahmi numerals are all non-positional decimal systems, and required large numbers of symbols. For instance, Egyptian numerals used different symbols for 10, 20, to 90, 100, 200, to 900, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, to 10,000.
The world's earliest positional decimal system was the Chinese rod calculus.
History of ancient numeral systems
Sexagesimal numerals were a mixed radix system that retained the alternating base 10 and base 6 in a sequence of cuneiform vertical wedges and chevrons. Sexagesimal numerals became widely used in commerce, but were also used in astronomical and other calculations. This system was exported from Babylonia and used throughout Mesopotamia, and by every Mediterranean nation that used standard Babylonian units of measure and counting, including the Greeks, Romans and Syrians. In Arabic numerals, we still use sexagesimal to count time (minutes per hour), and angles (degrees).
Arabic numerals
The decimal Hindu–Arabic numeral system with zero was developed in India by around AD 700. The development was gradual, spanning several centuries, but the decisive step was probably provided by Brahmagupta's formulation of zero as a number in AD 628. The system was revolutionary by including zero in positional notation, thereby limiting the number of individual digits to ten. It is considered an important milestone in the development of mathematics. One may distinguish between this positional "system", which is identical throughout the family, and the precise glyphs used to write the numerals, which varied regionally.
History of the Middle East
Arabian culture took off during the early Abbasid age, despite the prevalent political issues. Muslims saved and spread Greek advances in medicine, algebra, geometry, astronomy, anatomy, and ethics that would later finds it way back to Western Europe. The works of Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, and Euclid were saved and distributed throughout the empire (and eventually into Europe) in this manner. Muslim scholars also discovered the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in their conquests of south Asia. The use of this system in Muslim trade and political institutions allowed for the eventual popularization of it around the world; this number system would be critical to the Scientific revolution in Europe. Muslim intellectuals would become experts in chemistry, optics, and mapmaking during the Abbasid Caliphate. In the arts, Abbasid architecture expanded upon Umayyad architecture, with larger and more extravagant mosques. Persian literature grew based on ethical values. Astronomy was stressed in art. Much of this learning would find its way to the West. This was especially true during the crusades, as warriors would bring back Muslim treasures, weapons, and medicinal methods.
Arabic Braille
Arabic Braille (, "") is the braille alphabet for the Arabic language. It descends from a braille alphabet brought to Egypt by an English missionary prior to 1878, so the letter assignments generally correspond to English Braille and to the same romanization as in other braille systems, like Greek and Russian. However, there were once multiple standards, some of which (such as Algerian Braille) were unrelated to Egyptian Braille. A unified Arabic Braille was adopted in the 1950s as part of the move toward international braille, and it is the standard throughout the Arab world. Other Arabic-based alphabets have braille systems similar to Arabic Braille, such as Urdu and Persian Braille, but differ in some letter and diacritic assignments.
Old Arabic
Only three rather short inscriptions in the fully evolved Arabic script are known from the pre-Islamic period. They come from 6th century CE Syria, two from the southern region on the borders of Hawran, Jabal Usays (528 CE) and Harran (568 CE), and one from Zebed (512 CE), a town near Aleppo. They shed little light on the linguistic character of Arabic and are more interesting for the information they provide on the evolution of the Arabic script.
History of mathematics
Leonardo of Pisa, now known as Fibonacci, serendipitously learned about the Hindu–Arabic numerals on a trip to what is now Béjaïa, Algeria with his merchant father. (Europe was still using Roman numerals.) There, he observed a system of arithmetic (specifically algorism) which due to the positional notation of Hindu–Arabic numerals was much more efficient and greatly facilitated commerce. Leonardo wrote "Liber Abaci" in 1202 (updated in 1254) introducing the technique to Europe and beginning a long period of popularizing it. The book also brought to Europe what is now known as the Fibonacci sequence (known to Indian mathematicians for hundreds of years before that) which was used as an unremarkable example within the text.
Fibonacci
Fibonacci travelled around the Mediterranean coast, meeting with many merchants and learning about their systems of doing arithmetic. He soon realised the many advantages of the Hindu-Arabic system, which unlike the Roman numerals used at the time, allowed easy calculation using a place-value system. In 1202, he completed the "Liber Abaci" ("Book of Abacus" or "The Book of Calculation") which popularized Hindu–Arabic numerals in Europe.
Arabic numerals
The term "Arabic numerals" is ambiguous, it may also be intended to mean the numerals used by Arabs, in which case it generally refers to the Eastern Arabic numerals. Although the phrase "Arabic numeral" is frequently capitalized, it is sometimes written in lower case: for instance in its entry in the "Oxford English Dictionary", which helps to distinguish it from "Arabic numerals" as the Eastern Arabic numerals.
Arabic numerals
A distinctive West Arabic variant of the symbols begins to emerge around the 10th century in the Maghreb and Al-Andalus (sometimes called "ghubar" numerals, though the term is not always accepted), which are the direct ancestor of the modern "Arabic numerals" used throughout the world.
Woepecke has proposed that the Western Arabic numerals were already in use in Spain before the arrival of the Moors, purportedly received via Alexandria, but this theory is not accepted by scholars.
Arabic numerals
In the 10th century, Middle-Eastern mathematicians extended the decimal numeral system to include fractions, as recorded in a treatise by Syrian mathematician Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi in 952–953. The decimal point notation was introduced by Sind ibn Ali, who also wrote the earliest treatise on Arabic numerals.
List of Arabic star names
The astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in his "Almagest" (2nd century) tabulated the celestial position and brightness (visual magnitude) of 1,025 stars. Ptolemy's book was translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries and became famous in Europe as a 12th-century Latin translation. Many of the Arabic-language star descriptions in the "Almagest" came to be widely used as names for stars.
Arabs
Another important and unifying characteristic of Arabs is a common language. Arabic is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic Family. Evidence of its first use appears in accounts of wars in 853 BCE. It also became widely used in trade and commerce. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.7 billion Muslims.
Cyrillic numerals
Cyrillic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th century. It was used in the First Bulgarian Empire and by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century, when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals as part of his civil script reform initiative. Cyrillic numbers played a role in Peter the Great's currency reform plans, too, with silver wire kopecks issued after 1696 and mechanically minted coins issued between 1700 and 1722 inscribed with the date using Cyrillic numerals. By 1725, Russian Imperial coins had transitioned to Arabic numerals. The Cyrillic numerals may still be found in books written in the Church Slavonic language.
Tunisian Arabic
Classical Arabic began to be installed as a governmental and administrative language in Tunisia that was called then "Ifriqiya" from its older name "Africa" during the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in 673. The people of several urban cities were progressively influenced by Arabic. By the 11th century, through contact of local languages such as African Romance or Berber with Classical Arabic, some urban dialects appeared in the main coastal cities of Tunisia. The dialects were slightly and characteristically influenced by several common Berber structures and vocabulary like negation because Tamazight was the language of contact for citizens of that period. The new dialects were also significantly influenced by other historical languages.
History of combinatorics
Combinatorics came to Europe in the 13th century through mathematicians Leonardo Fibonacci and Jordanus de Nemore. Fibonacci's Liber Abaci introduced many of the Arabian and Indian ideas to Europe, including that of the Fibonacci numbers. Jordanus was the first person to arrange the binomial coefficients in a triangle, as he did in proposition 70 of "De Arithmetica". This was also done in the Middle East in 1265, and China around 1300. Today, this triangle is known as Pascal's triangle.
Aryabhata
Aryabhata's astronomical calculation methods were also very influential.
Along with the trigonometric tables, they came to be widely used in the Islamic world and used to compute many Arabic astronomical tables (zijes). In particular, the astronomical tables in the work of the Arabic Spain scientist Al-Zarqali (11th century) were translated into Latin as the Tables of Toledo (12th century) and remained the most accurate ephemeris used in Europe for centuries.
Equations of motion
The exposure of Europe to the collected works by the Muslims of the Greeks, the Indians and the Islamic scholars, such as Euclid’s "Elements", the works of Archimedes, and Al-Khwārizmī's treatises began in Spain, and scholars from all over Europe went to Spain, read, copied and translated the learning into Latin. The exposure of Europe to Arabic numerals and their ease in computations encouraged first the scholars to learn them and then the merchants and invigorated the spread of knowledge throughout Europe.
Mathematics
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 Islamic mathematics. Other notable developments of Indian mathematics include the modern definition of sine and cosine, and an early form of infinite series.
During the Golden Age of Islam, especially during the 9th and 10th centuries, mathematics saw many important innovations building on Greek mathematics. The most notable achievement of Islamic mathematics was the development of algebra. Other notable achievements of the Islamic period are advances in spherical trigonometry and the addition of the decimal point to the Arabic numeral system. Many notable mathematicians from this period were Persian, such as Al-Khwarismi, Omar Khayyam and Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī.
The Ciphers of the Monks
The numeral system was invented in the 1300s by French Cistercian monks. It was later replaced by the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. In any case, this numeral system later inspired several shorthands and secret ciphers.
Legacy of the Roman Empire
Roman numerals continued as the primary way of writing numbers in Europe until the 14th century, when they were largely replaced in common usage by Hindu-Arabic numerals. The Roman numeral system continues to be widely used, however, in certain formal and minor contexts, such as on clock faces, coins, in the year of construction on cornerstone inscriptions, and in generational suffixes (such as Louis XIV or William Howard Taft IV). According to the Royal Spanish Academy, in the Spanish language centuries must be written in Roman numerals, so "21st century" should be written as "Siglo XXI".
Numerical digit
The first true written positional numeral system is considered to be the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. 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. The original numerals were very similar to the modern ones, even down to the glyphs used to represent digits.
By the 13th century, Western Arabic numerals were accepted in European mathematical circles (Fibonacci used them in his "Liber Abaci"). They began to enter common use in the 15th century. By the end of the 20th century virtually all non-computerized calculations in the world were done with Arabic numerals, which have replaced native numeral systems in most cultures.
History of algebra
Throughout their time in power, before the fall of Islamic civilization, the Arabs used a fully rhetorical algebra, where often even the numbers were spelled out in words. The Arabs would eventually replace spelled out numbers (e.g. twenty-two) with Arabic numerals (e.g. 22), but the Arabs did not adopt or develop a syncopated or symbolic algebra until the work of Ibn al-Banna in the 13th century and Abū al-Hasan ibn Alī al-Qalasādī in the 15th century.
Ethnomathematics
The following is a sampling of some of the definitions of ethnomathematics proposed between 1985 and 2006:Some of the systems for representing numbers in previous and present cultures are well known. Roman numerals use a few letters of the alphabet to represent numbers up to the thousands, but are not intended for arbitrarily large numbers and can only represent positive integers. Arabic numerals are a family of systems, originating in India and passing to medieval Islamic civilization, then to Europe, and now standard in global culture—and having undergone many curious changes with time and geography—can represent arbitrarily large numbers and have been adapted to negative numbers, fractions, and real numbers.
Islamic world contributions to Medieval Europe
The translation of Al-Khwarizmi's work greatly influenced mathematics in Europe. As Professor Victor J. Katz writes: "Most early algebra works in Europe in fact recognized that the first algebra works in that continent were translations of the work of al-Khwärizmï and other Islamic authors. There was also some awareness that much of plane and spherical trigonometry could be attributed to Islamic authors". The words algorithm, deriving from Al-Khwarizmi's Latinized name Algorismi, and algebra, deriving from the title of his AD 820 book "Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala, Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala" are themselves Arabic loanwords. This and other Arabic astronomical and mathematical works, such as those by al-Battani and Muhammad al-Fazari's "Great Sindhind" (based on the "Surya Siddhanta" and the works of Brahmagupta). were translated into Latin during the 12th century.
Automobile model numbering system in the Soviet Union and Russia
The modern numbering system, documented as отраслевая нормаль (industry standard) ОН 025270-66, was first introduced in 1966 (but did not become effective immediately, so many vehicles that entered production before the mid-1970s still used the old numbering system; the first vehicle to use it was the all-new VAZ-2101, other plants switched to the new system later: Moskvitch - in 1976, Moskvitch 2140; GAZ - in 1982, GAZ-3102; and so on) and is still used in Russia, although not strictly adhered to by the manufacturers.
Lupitus of Barcelona
Lupitus was instrumental in the transfer of Arabic mathematics, including the astrolabe and the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Christian Europe. Gerbert of Aurillac in a letter of 984 asks Lupitus for a translation of an Arabic astronomical treatise, the "Sententiae astrolabii".
Arabic numerals
Cyrillic numerals were a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic alphabet, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals.
Arabic numerals
The reason the digits are more commonly known as "Arabic numerals" in Europe and the Americas is that they were introduced to Europe in the 10th century by Arabic-speakers of North Africa, who were then using the digits from Libya to Morocco. Arabs, on the other hand, call the base-10 system (not just these digits) "Hindu numerals", referring to their origin in India. This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the "Hindi numerals", namely the Eastern Arabic numerals ( - - - - - - - - - ) used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages (e.g. Devanagari: ).
Fibonacci
In the "Liber Abaci" (1202), Fibonacci introduced the so-called "modus Indorum" (method of the Indians), today known as the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. The book advocated numeration with the digits 0–9 and place value. The book showed the practical use and value of the new Hindu-Arabic numeral system by applying the numerals to commercial bookkeeping, converting weights and measures, calculation of interest, money-changing, and other applications. The book was well-received throughout educated Europe and had a profound impact on European thought. No copies of the 1202 edition are known to exist.
Eastern Arabic numerals
The numeral system originates from an ancient Indian numeral system, which was re-introduced in the book "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" written by the medieval-era Iranian mathematician and engineer Khwarazmi, whose name was Latinized as "Algoritmi".
Coin
The first European coin to use Arabic numerals to date the year in which the coin was minted was the St. Gall silver "Plappart" of 1424.
Arabic parts
Beginning in the tenth century, many Arabic manuscripts were translated into Latin, becoming the means by which Classical astrology found its way back to Europe. Medieval astrologers, most notably the major 13th-century Italian, Guido Bonatti, a contemporary of Dante, assumed it was the Arabs who originated the concept of the lots, and hence they came eventually to be called the "Arabic parts".
Islamic world contributions to Medieval Europe
A number of technologies in the Islamic world were adopted in European medieval technology. These included various crops; various astronomical instruments, including the Greek astrolabe which Arab astronomers developed and refined into such instruments as the "Quadrans Vetus", a universal horary quadrant which could be used for any latitude, and the "Saphaea", a universal astrolabe invented by Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī; the astronomical sextant; various surgical instruments, including refinements on older forms and completely new inventions; and advanced gearing in waterclocks and automata. Distillation was known to the Greeks and Romans, but was rediscovered in medieval Europe through the Arabs. The word alcohol (to describe the liquid produced by distillation) comes from Arabic "al-kuhl". The word alembic (via the Greek Ambix) comes from Arabic "al-anbiq". Islamic examples of complex water clocks and automata are believed to have strongly influenced the European craftsmen who produced the first mechanical clocks in the 13th century.
Arabic maqam
Since microtonal intervals are impractical to accurately notate, a simplified musical notation system was adopted in Arabic music at the turn of the 20th century. Starting with a chromatic scale, the Arabic scale is divided into 24 equal quarter tones, where a quarter tone equals half a semitone in a 12 tone equal-tempered scale. In this notation system all notes in a "maqam" scale are rounded to the nearest quarter tone.
History of algebra
The 12th century saw a flood of translations from Arabic into Latin and by the 13th century, European mathematics was beginning to rival the mathematics of other lands. In the 13th century, the solution of a cubic equation by Fibonacci is representative of the beginning of a revival in European algebra.
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
Its glyphs are descended from the Indian Brahmi numerals. The full system emerged by the 8th to 9th centuries, and is first described in Al-Khwarizmi's "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" (ca. 825), and Al-Kindi's four-volume work "On the Use of the Indian Numerals" (ca. 830). Today the name "Hindu–Arabic numerals" is usually used.
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
During the Gupta period (early 4th century to the late 6th century), the Gupta numerals developed from the Brahmi numerals and were spread over large areas by the Gupta empire as they conquered territory. Beginning around 7th century, the Gupta numerals developed into the Nagari numerals.
Musical notation
Cipher notation systems assigning Arabic numerals to the major scale degrees have been used at least since the Iberian organ tablatures of the 16th-century and include such exotic adaptations as "Siffernotskrift". The one most widely in use today is the Chinese "Jianpu", discussed in the main article. Numerals can of course also be assigned to different scale systems, as in the Javanese "kepatihan" notation described above.
Islam in India
There is much historical evidence to show that Arabs and Muslims interacted with Indians from the very early days of Islam or even before the arrival of Islam in Arab regions. Arab traders transmitted the numeral system developed by Indians to the Middle East and Europe.
Number theory
Other than a treatise on squares in arithmetic progression by Fibonacci (ca. 1175–1200)—who lived and studied in north Africa and Constantinople—no number theory to speak of was done in western Europe during the Middle Ages. Matters started to change in Europe in the late Renaissance, thanks to a renewed study of the works of Greek antiquity. A catalyst was the textual emendation and translation into Latin of Diophantus's "Arithmetica" (Bachet, 1621, following a first attempt by Xylander, 1575).
Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) never published his writings; in particular, his work on number theory is contained almost entirely in letters to mathematicians and in private marginal notes. He wrote down nearly no proofs in number theory; he had no models in the area. He did make repeated use of mathematical induction, introducing the method of infinite descent.
Arabic alphabet
Although Napoleon Bonaparte generally receives credit for introducing the printing press to Egypt during his invasion of that country in 1798, and though he did indeed bring printing presses and Arabic script presses to print the French occupation's official newspaper "Al-Tanbiyyah" ("The Courier"), printing in the Arabic language started several centuries earlier.
Arabic numerals
The numeral system employed, known as algorism, is positional decimal notation. Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, potentially including both symbols that evolved from the Brahmi numerals, and symbols that developed independently. The symbols used to represent the system have split into various typographical variants since the Middle Ages:The evolution of the numerals in early Europe is shown here in a table created by the French scholar Jean-Étienne Montucla in his "Histoire de la Mathematique", which was published in 1757:
Isopsephy
Until Arabic numerals were adopted and adapted from Indian numerals in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, and promoted in Europe by Fibonacci of Pisa with his 1202 book "Liber Abaci", numerals were predominantly alphabetical. For instance in Ancient Greece, Greek numerals used the alphabet. It is just a short step from using letters of the alphabet in everyday arithmetic and mathematics to seeing numbers in words, and to writing with an awareness of the numerical dimension of words.
Rumi Numeral Symbols
Rumi Numeral Symbols is a Unicode block containing numeric characters used in Fez, Morocco, and elsewhere in North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, between the tenth and seventeenth centuries.
History of the Arabic alphabet
Since the early 20th century, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and European influence increased, many non-Arab Islamic areas began using the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, and local adaptations of the Arabic alphabet were abandoned. In many cases, the writing of a language in Arabic script has become restricted to classical texts and traditional purposes (as in the Turkic States of Central Asia, or Hausa and others in West Africa ), while in others, the Arabic alphabet is used alongside the Latin one (as with Jawi in Brunei).
Mathematics in medieval Islam
Arabic works also played an important role in the transmission of mathematics to Europe during the 10th to 12th centuries.
Arabic numerals
The Hindu-Arabic numeral system was developed by Indian mathematicians around AD 500 using quite different forms of the numerals. From India, the system was adopted by Arabic mathematicians in Baghdad and passed on to the Arabs farther west. The current form of the numerals developed in North Africa. It was in the North African city of Bejaia that the Italian scholar Fibonacci first encountered the numerals; his work was crucial in making them known throughout Europe. The use of Arabic numerals spread around the world through European trade, books and colonialism.
Euclidean division
Before the discovery of Hindu–Arabic numeral system, which was introduced in Europe during the 13th century by Fibonacci, division was extremely difficult, and only the best mathematicians were able to do it. In fact, the long division algorithm requires this notation.
Hindu–Arabic numeral system
The familiar shape of the Western Arabic glyphs as now used with the Latin alphabet (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are the product of the late 15th to early 16th century, when they enter early typesetting.
Muslim scientists used the Babylonian numeral system, and merchants used the Abjad numerals, a system similar to the Greek numeral system and the Hebrew numeral system. Similarly, 's introduction of the system to Europe was restricted to learned circles.
The credit for first establishing widespread understanding and usage of the decimal positional notation among the general population goes to , an author of the German Renaissance, whose 1522 " was targeted at the apprentices of businessmen and craftsmen.
De Havilland Mosquito
Until the end of 1942 the RAF always used Roman numerals (I, II, ...) for mark numbers; 1943–1948 was a transition period during which new aircraft entering service were given Arabic numerals (1, 2, ...) for mark numbers, but older aircraft retained their Roman numerals. From 1948 onwards, Arabic numerals were used exclusively.
Arabic alphabet
A goldsmith (like Gutenberg) designed and implemented an Arabic-script movable-type printing-press in the Middle East. The Greek Orthodox monk Abd Allah Zakhir set up an Arabic printing press using movable type at the monastery of Saint John at the town of Dhour El Shuwayr in Mount Lebanon, the first homemade press in Lebanon using Arabic script. He personally cut the type molds and did the founding of the typeface. The first book came off his press in 1734; this press continued in use until 1899.
Arabic
In most of present-day North Africa, the Western Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are used. However, in Egypt and Arabic-speaking countries to the east of it, the Eastern Arabic numerals ( – – – – – – – – – ) are in use. When representing a number in Arabic, the lowest-valued position is placed on the right, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to-right scripts. Sequences of digits such as telephone numbers are read from left to right, but numbers are spoken in the traditional Arabic fashion, with units and tens reversed from the modern English usage. For example, 24 is said "four and twenty" just like in the German language ("vierundzwanzig") and Classical Hebrew, and 1975 is said "a thousand and nine-hundred and five and seventy" or, more eloquently, "a thousand and nine-hundred five seventy"
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
The work was most likely to have been Brahmagupta's "Brahma Sphuta Siddhanta" (Ifrah)  (The Opening of the Universe) which was written in 628 . Irrespective of whether Ifrah is right, since all Indian texts after Aryabhata's "Aryabhatiya" used the Indian number system, certainly from this time the Arabs had a translation of a text written in the Indian number system. 
In his text "The Arithmetic of Al-Uqlîdisî" (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), A.S. Saidan's studies were unable to answer in full how the numerals reached the Arab world:
Islamic world contributions to Medieval Europe
Stefan of Pise translated into Latin around 1127 an Arab manual of medical theory. The method of algorism for performing arithmetic with Indian-Arabic numerals was developed by the Persian al-Khwarizmi in the 9th century, and introduced in Europe by Leonardo Fibonacci (1170–1250). A translation by Robert of Chester of the "Algebra" by al-Kharizmi is known as early as 1145. Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 980–1037) compiled treatises on optical sciences, which were used as references by Newton and Descartes. Medical sciences were also highly developed in Islam as testified by the Crusaders, who relied on Arab doctors on numerous occasions. Joinville reports he was saved in 1250 by a “Saracen” doctor.
Numerals in Unicode
Roman numerals are a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, adapted from Etruscan numerals. The system used in classical antiquity was slightly modified in the Middle Ages to produce the system we use today. It is based on certain letters which are given values as numerals.
Pythagoreanism
Nicomachus' treatises were well known in Greek, Latin and the Arabic worlds. In the 1st century an Arabic translation of Nicomachus’ "Introduction to Arithmetic" was published. The Arabic translations of Nicomachus' treatises were in turn translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, making them part of the Latin tradition of numerology. The Pythagorean theorem was referenced in Arabic manuscripts. Scholars in the Arabic world displayed a strong interest in Pythagorean concepts. In the 1st century Abu al-Wafa' Buzjani discussed multiplication and division in a treatise on arithmetic for business administrators in reference to Nicomachus. However, the primary interest of Islamic arithmeticians was in solving practical problems, such as taxation, measurement, the estimation of agricultural values and business applications for the buying and selling of goods. There was little interest for the Pythagorean numerology that developed in the Latin world. The primary arithmetical system used by Islamic mathematicians was based on Hindu arithmetic, which rejected the notion that the relations between numbers and geometrical forms were symbolic.
Text figures
As the name "medieval numerals" implies, text figures have been in use since the Middle Ages, when Arabic numerals reached 12th century Europe, where they eventually supplanted Roman numerals.
History of the Arabic alphabet
The alphabet then had 28 letters, and so could be used to write the numbers 1 to 10, then 20 to 100, then 200 to 900, then 1000 (see Abjad numerals). In this numerical order, the new letters were put at the end of the alphabet. This produced this order: alif (1), b (2), j (3), d (4), h (5), w (6), z (7), H (8), T (9), y (10), k (20), l (30), m (40), n (50), s (60), ayn (70), f (80), S (90), q (100), r (200), sh (300), t (400), th (500), dh (600), kh (700), D (800), Z (900), gh (1000).