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Number systems have progressed from the use of fingers and tally marks, perhaps more than 40,000 years ago, to the use of sets of glyphs able to represent any conceivable number efficiently. The earliest known unambiguous notations for numbers emerged in Mesopotamia about 5000 or 6000 years ago.
c. 250 BC — late Olmecs had already begun to use a true zero (a shell glyph) several centuries before Ptolemy in the New World. See 0 (number) . 150 BC — Jain mathematicians in India write the “Sthananga Sutra”, which contains work on the theory of numbers, arithmetical operations, geometry , operations with fractions , simple equations ...
This was the most advanced number system in the world at the time, apparently in use several centuries before the common era and well before the development of the Indian numeral system. [108] Rod numerals allowed the representation of numbers as large as desired and allowed calculations to be carried out on the suan pan , or Chinese abacus.
European trade, books, and colonialism subsequently helped popularize the adoption of Arabic numerals around the world. The numerals are used worldwide—significantly beyond the contemporary spread of the Latin alphabet —and have become common in the writing systems where other numeral systems existed previously, such as Chinese and Japanese ...
The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, which originated in India and is now used throughout the world, is a positional base 10 system. Arithmetic is much easier in positional systems than in the earlier additive ones; furthermore, additive systems need a large number of different symbols for the different powers of 10; a positional system needs ...
In mathematics, the notion of number has been extended over the centuries to include zero (0), [3] negative numbers, [4] rational numbers such as one half (), real numbers such as the square root of 2 and π, [5] and complex numbers [6] which extend the real numbers with a square root of −1 (and its combinations with real numbers by adding or ...
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The peoples with whom the Greeks of Asia Minor (amongst whom notation in western history begins) were likely to have come into frequent contact were those inhabiting the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean; Greek tradition uniformly assigned the special development of geometry to the Egyptians, and the science of numbers to either the ...