It is now 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. 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.

Because of lack of authentic records, very little is known of the development of ancient Hindu mathematics. The earliest history is preserved in the 5000-year-old ruins of a city at Mohenjo Daro, located Northeast of present-day Karachi in Pakistan. Evidence of wide streets, brick dwellings an apartment houses with tiled bathrooms, covered city drains, and community swimming pools indicates a civilisation as advanced as that found anywhere else in the ancient Orient.

These early peoples had systems of writing, counting, weighing, and measuring, and they dug canals for irrigation. All this required basic mathematics and engineering.

The first important astronomical work, "Sürya Siddhanta" ("knowledge of the sun"), was written about the beginning of the fifth century. Hindu mathematics from here on became subservient to astronomy rather than religion. The mathematics coming from India were also influenced by Greek, Babylonian and Chinese mathematics. Brahmagupta was the most prominent mathematician of the seventh century. He lived and worked in the astronomical centre of Ujjain, in central India. Later in Indian history, we also had other, who wrote well about the Indian history of numbers. Some of their names were Aryabhatas, Mahavira and Bhaskara. Hindu mathematics after Bhaskara made only spotty progress until modern time. In 1907, the Indian Mathematical Society was founded, and two years later the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society started in Madres.

In the beginning of the first century, India developed to scripts:

Kharosthi and Brahmi. The Brahmi script is, however, more important than the Kharosthi because it is from Brahmi numerals that our own are directly descended Unlike the Kharosthi numerals, the Brahmi forms were written from left to right. The special interest of the Indian system is that it is the earliest form of the one, which we use today. Two and three were represented by repetitions of the horizontal stroke for one. There were distinct symbols for four to nine and also for ten and multiples of ten up to ninety, and for hundred and thousand.

This was a period of a great flowering of cultural activity in many areas of learning, but only in astronomy was there the strength of pressure, which could change so important a part of the culture as the numeral system.

About in the seventh century the separate strokes in the numerals for two and three became joined together into later forms, known as the Nagari numerals. These numerals show some striking likeness to our own.

"Evolution of Nagari numerals"

Towards the end of the eighth century an Indian astronomical textbook making use of the decimal place-value system, the Siddhanta of Brahmagupta, was brought to Baghdad and translated into Arabic. This translation had a profound effect upon the history of written numerals both in the Arab world itself and eventually also in the whole of the West. At that time the Arabs were still using the Greek numeral system.

We also have evidence that the Indian or Hindu system was known in the Arab world as early as the middle of the seventh century, the work which the great Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi was primarily responsible for. Al-Khwarizmi had become familiar with the Hindu system through study of the Siddhanta.

Knowledge of the Hindu system spread through the Arab world, reaching the Arabs of the West in Spain before the end of the tenth century. The earliest European manuscript, which came from the Hindu numerals were modified in north-Spain from the year 976.

The new numerals, which were invented, were not easy to influence other European inhabitant, especially the Romans. We must remember, when looking at history, and especially the history of mathematics, that what seems so obvious to us now, was not necessarily obvious the people who lived in the past. For them, a change in numeral system meant not merely learning an entire new principle for writing numbers but also becoming familiar with strange new symbols, which were unlike all others before. The zero symbol itself was a source of difficulty. People found it very hard to understand how it was that a symbol, which stood for nothing, could, when put next to a numeral, suddenly multiply its value ten-fold. Throughout this period of uncertainty there had been a number of mathematicians who had strongly supported the new numerals. One of these was the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. His book, the Liber Abaci, explains Arab arithmetic and algebra, and in it the strongly advocates use of the Hindu-Arabic numerals. No other single work contributed more towards the eventual triumph of the new numerals. Therefore, it was the mathematicians, rather than the astronomers, who ultimately ensure the almost universal adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numerals.

There are many differences between the Greek and the Hindu mathematics. In the first place, the Hindus who worked in mathematics regarded themselves primarily as astronomers. Hindu mathematics remained largely a handmaiden to astronomy. With the Greeks, mathematics attained an independent existence and was studied for it owns sake.

Hindu mathematics is largely empirical, with proofs or derivations seldom offered; an outstanding characteristic of Greek mathematics is its insistence on rigorous demonstration. Hindu mathematics is of very uneven quality, good and poor mathematics often appearing side by side; the Greeks seemed to have an instinct that led them to distinguish good from poor quality.

Some of the contrasts between Greek and Hindu mathematics is perpetuated today in the differences between many of our elementary geometry and algebra textbooks, because the former are deductive and the latter are often collections of rules.

Conclusion: In its final form the Hindu system of writing numerals is fundamentally different from that of the Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks and the Romans. The Hindus have special symbols for the individual numbers from one to nine, whose rank are indicated by their positions. The Hindu system is to some extent a continuation of the early Chinese system, although it has not been proved that there was direct influence. The Hindu system is a pure place-value system. Only a pure place-value system needs a symbol for a missing amount, for a non-existent rank, the zero. Only the Hindus within the context of Indo-European civilisations have consistently used a zero.