Who Really Invented 0–9?

We call them Arabic numerals, but in Arabic they're called "the Indian numbers".

The ten digits began in India, where place value and zero were worked out (Brahmagupta wrote rules for zero in 628). Around 825, al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on the Indian way of counting in Baghdad. In 1202, Fibonacci, who learned them in Algeria, spread them across Europe, and Europeans called them "Arabic" because that's who they learned them from. Even the word zero made the trip: śūnya → ṣifr → zero.

The full thousand-year journey is in our full film.

Sources: K. Plofker, Mathematics in India (2009); M. Folkerts (1997); L. Sigler, Fibonacci's Liber Abaci (2002); OED, "zero".

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