Try to imagine using Roman numerals to balance your checkbook – it’s unthinkable, and among other failings, Roman numerals have no zeros. Numbers are the most momentous idea in the history of human nature and from their inception in elementary forms of counting (beginning with a binary division and proceeding to the use of fingers and toes as bases) to the Greek idealization of number, an increasingly abstract type of thinking developed, paralleling the maturation of the time concept.

Because of a lack of authentic records, very little is known about the development of our modern numerical system, and more specifically how it is written. It is speculated that the first known use of numbers dates back to around 30,000 BC – bones and other artifacts have been discovered with marks cut into them which many consider to be tally marks. Today, however, it is universally accepted that our decimal numbers derive from forms, which were invented in India and transmitted via Arab culture to Europe, undergoing a number of changes on the way. At the time, Europeans were using Roman numbers with abacuses for calculation, so in the beginning these numbers were very unpopular in Europe, since people were used to using abacuses where you could watch the calculation taking place. But they soon realized how much easier it was to do calculations with Arabic numbers. We also know that several different ways of writing numbers evolved in India before it became possible for existing decimal numerals to be marred with the place-value principle of the Babylonians to give birth to the system which eventually became the one which we use today. The first known system with place-value was the Mesopotamian base 60 system (ca. 3400 BC) and the earliest known base 10 system dates to 3100 BC in Egypt.

The numbers we all use (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) are known as “Arabic” numbers to distinguish them from the “Roman Numerals” (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, etc). Actually the Arabs popularized these numbers, but they were originally used by the early Phoenician traders to count and keep track of their trading accounts. The way we write these numbers has its origins in angles and in the number of angles – if you write down the older form of the numbers we use today, you will immediately see why.

SEE IMAGE ABOVE:

No 1 has one angle.

No 2 has two angles.

No 3 has three angles.

etc.

and “O” has no angles