Quotes About Hindu-Arabic

Having described the basic methods of Hindu-Arabic arithmetic in the first seven chapters, Leonardo devoted most of the remainder of the book to practical problems. Chapters 8 and 9 provide dozens of worked examples on buying, selling, and pricing merchandise, using what we would today call reasoning by proportions—the math we use to check the best deal in the supermarket.

The number system we use today—the Hindu-Arabic system—was developed in India and seems to have been completed by around 700 CE. Indian mathematicians made advances in what would today be described as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, much of their work being motivated by an interest in astronomy. The system is based on three key ideas: notations for the numerals, place value, and zero.