History PDF EPUB

The Hindu-Arabic Numerals

by Louis Charles Karpinski, David Eugene Smith

First published: 1911
Pages: 365

Read online EPUB Download Save

About this book

The digits everyone calls Arabic are not Arabic in origin, and Smith and Karpinski open by saying so before setting out to trace where the symbols really came from. The preface admits the story had often been told in pieces but not gathered up for a long while, so the eight chapters pull the scattered scholarship together. The trail runs from early Hindu forms that carried no place value, through the later forms that did, to the symbol for zero, then to the Arabs, and at last into a Europe that kept Roman notation for centuries more. A separate chapter asks whether Boethius knew the figures and concludes he might have, minus the zero, but that no reliable evidence says he did. Ginn and Company published it in 1911, with footnotes citing sources in several languages.

About the author

Louis Charles Karpinski

David Eugene Smith (1860-1944) taught at Teachers College, Columbia University, from 1901 until his retirement in 1922 and became one of the leading American historians of mathematics, as well as a determined collector of rare mathematical books and manuscripts that went to Columbia, where they are still consulted.

Open the author page