Sinhala numerals to record donations given by royals and other people who were belonged to the upper echelon of ancient Sinhala society to Buddhist temples. Brahmi numerals are ancestors of Arabic numerals which are used presently worldwide. Brahmi numerals had symbols for 10,100, and 1000. Number 1 and 10 in Brahmi have not been found in Sri Lanka up to now. Therefore, shapes of these two numerals have been hypothesized taking into consideration of shapes of Brahmi Number 1 and 10 found in India without physical evidence . Sinhala rock inscriptions suddenly become barren of numerals from A.D. 400 onwards. Tradition of
Indian numerals Bakhshali Manuscript, written sometime before the 5th century, also included zero. But it is in Khmer numerals of modern Cambodia where the first extant material evidence of zero as a numerical figure, dating its use back to the seventh century, is found. As it was from the Arabs that the Europeans learned this system, the Europeans called them "Arabic numerals;" the Arabs refer to their numerals as "Indian numerals". In academic circles they are called the "Hindu–Arabic" or "Indo–Arabic" numerals. The significance of the development of the positional number system is probably best described by the French mathematician Pierre Simon