On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, RK wrote:
>
> The zero originated with ancient Indian mathematicians; this was incorporated
> into the Arabic system of numbering which is what we use, almost completely
> unchanged, to this day.
> RK
>
When Al-Harizmi (Al-gorithm) met the gypsies from India, he made the
Arab governor to pursuade the gypsies to teach their secret science of
numbers to him. He learned the numbers from 1 to 9, and the decimal
representation. BUT, the gypsies were not using a symbol for "zero",
instead leaving that place empty, which confuses 1 with 10 or 100, etc.
The numbers used now by the Arabs consists of the curves that the gypsies
taught Al-Harizmi except for the zero, which is represented by a "dot".
After that, the famous decimal way of making multiplications, divisions,
additions, etc. became a "method" rather than a "magic" which only the
ones with strong counting capabilities could do.
I wonder the way it spread to the world. It is unlikely that Greeks
(Byzantine?) were the first to utilize it, though.
Best,
Here comes the OM content:
OMer
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|