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
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