Arabic numerals Arabic numerals Arabic numerals, also called Hindu–Arabic numerals, are the ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; or numerals written using them in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (where the position of a digit indicates the power of 10 to multiply it by). It is the most common system for the symbolic representation of numbers in the world today. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system was developed by Indian mathematicians around AD 500 using quite different forms of the numerals. From India, the system was adopted by Arabic mathematicians in Baghdad and passed on to the Arabs farther
Arabic numerals include fractions, as recorded in a treatise by Syrian mathematician Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi in 952–953. The decimal point notation was introduced by Sind ibn Ali, who also wrote the earliest treatise on Arabic numerals. A distinctive West Arabic variant of the symbols begins to emerge around the 10th century in the Maghreb and Al-Andalus (sometimes called "ghubar" numerals, though the term is not always accepted), which are the direct ancestor of the modern "Arabic numerals" used throughout the world. Woepecke has proposed that the Western Arabic numerals were already in use in Spain before the arrival of the Moors, purportedly received