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A History of Numerals Across Civilizations
A survey of how ancient peoples wrote numbers: additive signs in Egypt and Rome, letter numerals in Greece, and place-value systems in Babylon, China and India.
Counting, Numerals and Mathematics
Numeral Systems Through History
How Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians and Indian scholars wrote numbers.
Attic Greek Acrophonic Numerals
How Athens wrote numbers with signs taken from the first letters of number words, what each sign meant, and why the Milesian letter system eventually replaced them.
Babylonian Cuneiform Place Value
How Babylonian scribes wrote numbers with two wedge shapes in a base-60 positional system, and how they coped for centuries without a sign for an empty place.
Chinese Rod Numerals and Counting Boards
How Chinese calculators laid out counting rods on a board in vertical and horizontal forms, ran decimal arithmetic by position, and later wrote the same shapes down.
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Numerals and Their Unit Signs
A guide to the Egyptian signs for one, ten, a hundred and beyond, how scribes combined them into larger numbers, and how fractions and hieratic fit in.
Fibonacci and the Spread of Arabic Numerals in Europe
How Leonardo of Pisa's 1202 Liber Abaci taught merchants the Hindu-Arabic digits, why adoption in Europe was slow, and what earlier contacts had already shown.
Greek Alphabetic Numerals and the Milesian System
How Greek letters came to stand for numbers 1 to 900, how thousands and marks were written, and how this letter notation fed later gematria and isopsephy practices.
How Brahmi Numerals Became Hindu-Arabic Digits
The path of the digit shapes from early Indian Brahmi inscriptions through Gupta and Nagari forms and Arabic scholars to the numerals used worldwide today.
Roman Numerals and How They Were Used
Where the Roman numeral letters may have come from, how subtractive forms like IV and IX worked, and why the system survives on clocks, monuments and book chapters.
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