History of The Hindu–Arabic Numeral System - Adoption By The Arabs

Adoption By The Arabs

Before the rise of the Arab Empire, 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:

"I will omit all discussion of the science of the Indians, ..., of their subtle discoveries in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians, and of their valuable methods of calculation which surpass description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value."

According to al-Qifti's chronology of the scholars :

"... a person from India presented himself before the Caliph al-Mansur in the year who was well versed in the siddhanta method of calculation related to the movement of the heavenly bodies, and having ways of calculating equations based on the half-chord calculated in half-degrees ... This is all contained in a work ... from which he claimed to have taken the half-chord calculated for one minute. Al-Mansur ordered this book to be translated into Arabic, and a work to be written, based on the translation, to give the Arabs a solid base for calculating the movements of the planets ..."

The work was most likely to have been Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta (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:

"It seems plausible that it drifted gradually, probably before the 7th century, through two channels, one starting from Sind, undergoing Persian filtration and spreading in what is now known as the Middle East, and the other starting from the coasts of the Indian Ocean and extending to the southern coasts of the Mediterranean."

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 ) "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.