Evolution of Symbols
The numeral system employed, known as algorism, is positional decimal notation. Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, all of which evolved from the Brahmi numerals. The symbols used to represent the system have split into various typographical variants since the Middle Ages:
- The widespread Western Arabic numerals used with the Latin script, in the table below labelled European, descended from the West Arabic numerals developed in al-Andalus and the Maghreb. (There are two typographic styles for rendering European numerals, known as lining figures and text figures).
- The Arabic–Indic or Eastern Arabic numerals, used with the Arabic script, developed primarily in what is now Iraq. A variant of the Eastern Arabic numerals used in the Persian and Urdu languages is shown as East Arabic-Indic. There is substantial variation in usage of glyphs for the Eastern Arabic-Indic digits, especially for the digits four, five, six, and seven.
- The Devanagari numerals used with Devanagari and related variants are grouped as Indian numerals.
The evolution of the numerals in early Europe is shown on a table created by the French scholar J.E. Montucla in his Histoire de la Mathematique, which was published in 1757:
The Arabic numeral glyphs 0-9 are encoded in ASCII and UTF-8 at positions 0x30 to 0x39, matching up with the second hex-digit for convenience:
| Binary | Octal | Decimal | Hexadecimal | Glyph |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0011 0000 | 060 | 48 | 30 | 0 |
| 0011 0001 | 061 | 49 | 31 | 1 |
| 0011 0010 | 062 | 50 | 32 | 2 |
| 0011 0011 | 063 | 51 | 33 | 3 |
| 0011 0100 | 064 | 52 | 34 | 4 |
| 0011 0101 | 065 | 53 | 35 | 5 |
| 0011 0110 | 066 | 54 | 36 | 6 |
| 0011 0111 | 067 | 55 | 37 | 7 |
| 0011 1000 | 070 | 56 | 38 | 8 |
| 0011 1001 | 071 | 57 | 39 | 9 |
Read more about this topic: Arabic Numerals
Famous quotes containing the words evolution of, evolution and/or symbols:
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)
“The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)