In everyday life, we all use the status value decimal number system for calculations, whether for taxpayers, our purchases, paying household bills or in certain disciplines. It consists of ten symbols (numbers) - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 - which we can use to represent any number of numbers we may need.
The value of the symbol changes according to its position - place - within the number we write. This is a very powerful and efficient way to write numbers, and the algorithms it uses also make it a very efficient system to do calculations. These numbers are often called Arabic numerals, or more precisely Indian Arabic numerals, because our Europeans inherited them and the whole system of how they were used in the High Middle Ages from the Islamic Empire, which in the early Middle Ages from India inherited their origins. Below I will describe the path of this number system from India to medieval Europe, which has several twists and turns.
The history of the early development of the status-value decimal system is long, complex, and full of holes, and I won't deal with it here. It also throws up some important and unanswered questions. As early as the early 2nd millennium BC, the Babylonians developed a place numbering system, but it was a sexagesimal or sixty-sixty numbering system rather than a decimal numbering system. The Babylonian system even had a placeholder zero in its later versions. This raises the question of whether the Indians got the idea of the place value system from the Babylonians, but it is not well known. The Chinese also have a decimal number system for status value, but it is not known whether the Chinese influenced the Indians, whether the Indians were Chinese or both developed the system independently.
There are three principle numbers that played a central role in the transmission of the status-valued decimal number system, the first of which was the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta (c.598-c.668CE), most of his Time lived in Bilama (modern Bhinmal) in northwestern India. He wrote his Brāhma-sphuṭa-siddhānta, a treatise on astronomy, written in verse, in 62 chapters of 24 chapters and 1008 verses. Presumably scientific writings were written in poetry in ancient cultures to make them easier to recite in major oral societies. While astronomical work Brahmagupta devoted several chapters to mathematics. Chapter 12 is devoted to arithmetic and introduces basic arithmetic operations.
In Chapter 18, he deals with negative numbers and zeros, not placeholders, but numbers. He defined zero as the result of subtracting a number from itself and gave the correct rules for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by zero. Unfortunately, he defines zero division by zero and gives a term for dividing a number by zero without stating what the result is. Of course, we now say that division by zero is undefined. Brahmagupta's use of zero as a number is the earliest known use of this, but that doesn't mean he invented zero as a number. His description suggests that this is already common usage. We know that zero as a number does not appear in the astronomical texts of Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata (476-550 AD), criticized by Brahmagupta, so we can assume that the time between the two works is zero. The sphuṭa-Vahidanta of Brahman also contains what we call algebraic details which are not necessarily of interest to us here, although we will describe them again as they meet. The sphuṭa-Wahidanta of Sanskrit was translated into Arabic by the CE in the eighth century, and became one of the main sources of the Islamic Empire for the Indian numeral system. (Hacker Weekly)