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> The reckoning by long hundreds waned as Arabic numerals ... spread throughout Europe during and after the 14th century It is only recently I learned that the

> The reckoning by long hundreds waned as Arabic numerals ... spread throughout Europe during and after the 14th century It is only recently I learned that the spread of Arabic Numerals was so recent

kibwen 6y ago
Given the barriers to communication back then it feels like it didn't take them all that long to make their way to Europe. The numeral system seems to have been codified in India by 700, then extended by the Arabs to decimals and fractions by 900, then began making its way into Europe by 1000. The callout to the 14th century might just be because that's about when the printing press was developed, which caused the dissemination of knowledge to really start kicking off in general.
- cperciva 6y ago
  The spread of decimal numerals in the 14th century had less to do with the printing press and more to do with growing commerce and increasingly powerful states -- both of which necessitated performing arithmetic on larger quantities.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    The explanation I read was that accounting ledgers were the first big market for printed books after the Bible, and being printed ruled with columns, numbers had to fit in the columns, so became decimal. The notion that commerce was small before 1300 does not seem to me to withstand scrutiny. Curiously, the abacus was in use in Europe for centuries before written arabic numerals were used. So, the concept of place-zero was in practical use long before it got a name. It is claimed that our numbers are big-endian because they were written, in Arabic, right-to-left embedded in right-to-left text, so little-endian. But we picked up the Arabic visual representation without the meaning. All the nuisance of right-justifying numbers to line them up by place (now automated, but it used to be a huge hassle on mechanical typewriters) could have been avoided by adopting the same endianness relative to our text. But, I don't know what the original Indian form was, either the digit order or the text. It predated the advent of Arabic usage in India by some centuries.

> The reckoning by long hundreds waned as Arabic numerals ... spread throughout Europe during and after the 14th century It is only recently I learned that the spread of Arabic Numerals was so recent

kibwen 6y ago

Given the barriers to communication back then it feels like it didn't take them all that long to make their way to Europe. The numeral system seems to have been codified in India by 700, then extended by the Arabs to decimals and fractions by 900, then began making its way into Europe by 1000. The callout to the 14th century might just be because that's about when the printing press was developed, which caused the dissemination of knowledge to really start kicking off in general.

cperciva 6y ago
The spread of decimal numerals in the 14th century had less to do with the printing press and more to do with growing commerce and increasingly powerful states -- both of which necessitated performing arithmetic on larger quantities.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  The explanation I read was that accounting ledgers were the first big market for printed books after the Bible, and being printed ruled with columns, numbers had to fit in the columns, so became decimal. The notion that commerce was small before 1300 does not seem to me to withstand scrutiny. Curiously, the abacus was in use in Europe for centuries before written arabic numerals were used. So, the concept of place-zero was in practical use long before it got a name. It is claimed that our numbers are big-endian because they were written, in Arabic, right-to-left embedded in right-to-left text, so little-endian. But we picked up the Arabic visual representation without the meaning. All the nuisance of right-justifying numbers to line them up by place (now automated, but it used to be a huge hassle on mechanical typewriters) could have been avoided by adopting the same endianness relative to our text. But, I don't know what the original Indian form was, either the digit order or the text. It predated the advent of Arabic usage in India by some centuries.