A Quick Animated History of Why We Use the Numbers We Use

I find the history of numbers so much more captivating than the program of issue . Who like about learning calculus , when you’re able to geek out on the brief story of numerical system ?

Alessandra Kingshows us how different civilisation came up with dissimilar way to count things , and it ’s really neat to equate all the unlike numerical systems ( and see how similar they can be ) . former civilizations just made bare scar , but as they got more forward-looking , they ask a system to give down bigger numbers . The Greeks , Hebrew and Egyptians used a organisation that were just extensions of tally chump with some newfangled symbolization add together in . The Babylonians , Chinese , and Aztec came up with positional notation ( the approximation that you could re - use the same symbol but they would take on unlike value depending where they were identify ) severally from each other .

But it was n’t until the 8th century , when Amerindic mathematicians came up with the decimal ( base 10 ) system that we started to get something we use now . Arab conquerors , merchandiser , and scholars spread the base 10 system with Arabic numeral to Europe and it replaced papistical number in everyday sprightliness around the fifteenth hundred . give thanks God , math would have been right smart hard if it did n’t .