Survey says most Americans believe 'Arabic numerals' shouldn't be taught in

Speaking as someone who actually lived and worked in Kuwait … and I actually knew and used Arabic numerals, I’m afraid there is a double irony here!

  1. The only 2 numbers Westerners use that are Arabic is the number 1 and the number 9.
    and
  2. What the Arabs taught us was the Base 10 numbering system… not the numbers!

Western numbers are “invented” stylized representations of the number of angles represented by each number.

When the term Arabic numbers is used, it really means the Base 10 system,

… which we learned from the Arabs
… who learned from Indian mathematicians.

**The Arabs didn’t like the numbers drawn by the Indians **
… and Westerners didn’t like the numbers drawn by the Arabs!

[ BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO MAXIMIZE THE FONT SIZE! ]

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I think the survey is an indictment of the American education system, but I don’t really agree with the way it’s been twisted to include a charge of bigotry.

If you don’t know what is meant by “Arabic numerals”, and think it means a numerical system entirely different to “western” numerals, then there’s nothing inherently bigoted about not thinking it should be taught in schools. Why should it be?

That’s not to say that bigotry is irrelevant to the survey - I’m sure some respondents were bigoted and responded in that way out of bigotry rather than thinking deeply about how to build school curricula.

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Those “Arabic numbers” in your meme are in fact “Eastern Arabic numbers”. “Western numbers”, as you call then, originated as “Western Arabic Numbers” in the Magreb.

The_Brahmi_numeral_system_and_its_descendants

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Why thank you, Robert. :sunglasses:

I don’t believe either of those is true. Like the alphabet, numerals have changed shape and diverged over time. That’s all.

Wow… i have looked for this information for years… but didnt have a name and couldnt produce it in a search!!! So all i could think was it was unfounded rumor!

Well done @evograd!

I will revise my comments and my sarcasm accordingly!!!

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Armed with the term “Western Arabic”, we now get a better picture of what is going on… this term means “SPANISH Arabic”!!!

There seems to have been some necessary evolution in the middle digits: 5, 6, & 7 (or the like… i dont have the image of the changes on my screen at the moment!).

“The widespread Western Arabic numerals used with the Latin script, in the table below labelled European , descended from the West Arabic numerals developed in al-Andalus (Andalucía, Spain) and the Maghreb. Spanish scholars, because of the geographic proximity, trade, and constant warfare with the Muslim kingdoms of Southern Spain, saw a potential in the simplicity of Arabic numbers, and decided to adopt those symbols, and later other Europeans followed suit. There are two typographic styles for rendering European numerals, known as lining figures and text figures.”

But now i need to sort out how much of the numerical crafting was authentically Maghreb (n. Africa)… and how much was in the mixing bowl of Islamic Spain!

Yeah, as long as one ignores the multi-century history of bigoted treatment (in the form of incalculable human misery through slavery and genocidal acts) inflicted upon people of African and aboriginal heritage—as well as the bigotry heaped on non-Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Roman Catholics, Irish people, Jewish people, Asian people, Polish people, Italians, Appalachians, et al etc. etc. Robert, can you think of a people group in North American history which has NOT been the target of cruel bigotry?

Isn’t that an example of bigotry in North America, Robert?

Byer’s Point™ reached.

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George, I’ve often wondered about this for a number of scholarly developments—but never took the time to research them.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot about Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) that gets short shrift in America’s history classes.

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@AllenWitmerMiller (cc: @evograd)

We will see that nuances abound!

" The first mentions of the numerals in the West are found in the Codex Vigilanus of 976.[26]

From the 980s, Gerbert of Aurillac (later, Pope Sylvester II) used his position to spread knowledge of the numerals in Europe.
Gerbert studied in Barcelona in his youth. He was known to have requested mathematical treatises concerning the [astrolabe]
(Astrolabe - Wikipedia)from [Lupitus of Barcelona] (Lupitus of Barcelona - Wikipedia) after he had returned to France."

Leonardo Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa), a mathematician born in the Republic of Pisa who had studied in Béjaïa (Bougie), [Algeria] (Algeria - Wikipedia),
promoted the Indian numeral system in Europe with his 1202 book Liber Abaci.

“The numerals are arranged with their lowest value digit to the right,
with higher value positions added to the left. This arrangement is
the same in Arabic as well as the Indo-European languages.”

@AllenWitmerMiller, it looks like these numbers were genuinely developed in
North Africa… (see text below) but there really were many intermediate steps,
so it wouldn’t surprise me if by tracking individual numbers, we find that some digits
achieved their definitive form in one region, and others in another region. As I
mentioned in an earlier post, the number 1 and the number 9 seemed to have
“fixed” earlier on (though it is imaginable that where 9 was first found in the
Western Arabic and where it was finally “fixed” could be different too).

Another Note:
While some sources are rather adamant that the Western Arabic numbers did
not have their origin in the number of angles being represented, I’m not so sure
we can immediately dismiss the hypothesis. While I assumed that this process
was a Western European process, it could have just as easily been a process
of the very cerebral Muslim mathematicians! It seems amazingly coincidental
(by anyone’s standards) that the numbers 1 to 8 should be so easily converted
into angular equivalents (with 7 being awkward, and yet also historically being
depicted awkwardly)… and yet with Eastern Arabic (٠ - ١ - ٢ - ٣ -٤ - ٥ - ٦ - ٧ - ٨ - ٩),
nor the Indian forms (०.१.२.३.४.५.६.७.८.९), we find such serendipity!

"The reason the digits are more commonly known as “Arabic numerals” in
Europe and the Americas is that they were introduced to Europe in the 10th
century by Arabic-speakers of North Africa, who were then using the digits
from Libya to Morocco. Arabs, on the other hand, call the base-10 system
(not just these digits) “Hindu numerals”,
[27]; [28]
referring to their origin in India."

"This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the “Hindi numerals”, namely
**the Eastern Arabic numerals (٠ - ١ - ٢ - ٣ -٤ - ٥ - ٦ - ٧ - ٨ - ٩) **
used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages
(e.g. Devanagari: ०.१.२.३.४.५.६.७.८.९).[[21]]
(Arabic numerals - Wikipedia)

"The European acceptance of the numerals was accelerated by the invention of the
printing press, and they became widely
known during the 15th century."

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Great topic and post, George.

And speaking of Fibonacci, I also think about the Italian merchants who developed what became modern accounting [or so I was told in my accounting class textbooks] and how Arabic numerals must have been much appreciated.

Yes, the “intermediate steps” of those numbers would have been fascinating to track through the centuries.

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Here’s a Google Books link that looks worth treasuring!

The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives

edited by J. P. Hogendijk, A. I. Sabra, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Ṣabra

As early as page 4 we read that the Indians, when they finally perfected
zero, used a small circle to represent zero. The Arabs, turned the zero
into a “dot”!

Using a dot for a zero sounds scary to me! (Especially where houseflies might exist in an accountant’s office.)

@AllenWitmerMiller,

Obviously, the Western orthographers agreed with you!

But just to show you how resistant the history of numerical of orthography
is to “casual generalizations”… here is a presentation showing that
the Bakhshali manuscript (the oldest mathematical Indian text
yet found and written on birch bark!)… uses a dot!

@AllenWitmerMiller

Partial Vindication is a sweet dish … though not completely filling!

Here is the history of the “glyph” for number 5!

"The evolution of the modern Western for the numeral 5 cannot be traced back
to the Indian system as for the numbers 1 to 4. The [Kushana] (Kushan Empire - Wikipedia) and Gupta empires
in what is now India had among themselves several different glyphs
which bear no resemblance to the modern glyph.

The Nagari and Punjabi took these glyphs and all came up with glyphs that are
similar to a lowercase “h” rotated 180°."

image

“The Ghubar [Ghubar = “Sand Table” or Western] Arabs transformed the glyph in
several different ways, producing glyphs that were more similar to the numbers
4 or 3 than to the number 5.[4] It was from
those characters that Europeans finally came up with the modern 5.”

The fact the number 5 does not adhere to the “angles scheme” suggests
that to the extent these numbers do follow the scheme is probably because
of the nudging of European “numeralogical idealists”!

Even with my limited background in historical and comparative linguistics, I can create a very long impromptu list of various functions of the dot in the history of orthography. The mind boggles!

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While Lemaitre did derive the expansion of the Universe, he also came up with the Big Bang. This comes naturally by starting with the expansion of the Universe and “playing the movie backwards”. Back then it was not called the Big Bang theory, but the theory of the “cosmic egg” or “primeval atom”, in reference to the singularity one gets when one “plays the movie backwards” on cosmic expansion. The fact that he was a Catholic priest added to the resistance of his contemporaries from accepting the theory, because this looks too much like creation.

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American dominance is a fact or not. Nothing to do with bigotry. Again I stand by my claims. Your acusatiuons against Americans is silly. Way beyond wrong.
For all intents and purposes its been almost a perfect record relative to numbers and time. Never mind everyone else.
You do not know American or world history. Its silly what you said.

@Robert_Byers,

Do you know how to use the quote tool?
It’s silly to say something someone said is silly if you don’t quote the the statement in question.

I agree. It’s truly mind-boggling when one visits.

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