The Hindu-Arabic Numerals

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.