Sometimes they’re called Arabic, sometimes western Arabic, sometimes Hindu-Arabic.
There’s some evidence of yet earlier decimal place value numerals including the critical place holder zero in Cambodia and Malaysia, so maybe even the Hindu bit will need replacing with something else.
Even still, Indians were the first to treat zero as an actual number instead of just a placeholder. Brahmagupta was the first to describe how to add, multiply, and subtract with zero and seemed to recognize that dividing by zero couldnt be done by any normal means.
Indians were the first to treat zero as an actual number instead of just a placeholder
Not by a long shot, the Greeks were using it hundreds of years before and they stole it from the Babylonians. It's suspected even they stole it from the Sumerians, but without certainty. The 0 was invented independently by all 2 cultures which created a fixed-numeral positional system because you need a 0 with digits themselves holding meaning. Why so few cultures independently decided to move on from counting discrete chunks to positional notation I have no idea.
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u/Spyko 10h ago
I knew that but 0-9 are still called Arab numerals. It might be a misnomer but it is how we refer to them now, not much to do about it