The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.” Distortion of the Hindu numeral system and origin of the Hindu-Arabic Numeral system Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and places arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. “The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged from India. It too was transmitted to the Arabs (and later into Europe), studied and suited accordingly to Arabic needs and as a result, what was an original Hindu numeral system, came to be called as Hindu-Arabic numeral system that the world knows of today.įrench scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace, in support of it once wrote:

One such original Indian product, which has profound significance on the development and evolution of mathematics, is the numeral and place-value system. The case of Hindu-Arabic numeral and place value system And nearly all such complex ideas and theorems and methods travelled abroad, mixed, modified, and interpolated with the ideas of the land it travelled to and were later wrongly attributed to either Greeks or Europeans thereby hiding their Indian origins. The Babylonians used only two symbols to represent their numbers: the 'wedge' marked tens and the 'nail' marked ones.In Mathematics alone, Numeral system (as this article would argue), arithmetical principles, invention of zero, notions of infinity, the power and place value, decimal systems, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, calculus and many other mathematical concepts came from India. ( TAMU Web Article - Babylonian Mathematics) An example would be rewriting the mixed number 3 24/60 as 3 14 in Babylonian notation. The symbol of the semicolon is known as a 'seperatrix' notation. The way they would write this was in the form a b, where a is the whole part, and b is the fractional part, which had to be a number less than 60 (since that was their base). (The Story of Numbers, 32) Besides their development in whole number notations, they also used notations for fractional parts too. Their knowledge of mathematics skyrocketed, once they had taken over the Sumerian empire in the early 20th century B.C.

This new development greatly increased their effectiveness in growing the field of Mathematics. Meanwhile, 60^4 is 12,960,000 which contains 225 divisors! This large number of divisors in turn makes addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division much easier to work with! ( The Magic of Numbers, pages 24&26)īabylonian mathematics introduced a place-value system including a primitive form of '0' which was used to describe that there was no value of a particular order. Ten to the power of four is 10,000 which only contains 25 divisors. This difference only gets bigger when we consider these two bases taken to their fourth power. Ten has only four divisors, whereas 60 has 12 divisors. This system was chosen most likely out of its friendliness to factoring. This number system is based on the number 60, rather than the usual decimal counting of tens. The Babylonians used a very different number system from what is normally seen today.

Convert babylonian numerals to hindu