Arabic numerals milestone in the development of mathematics. One may distinguish between this positional "system", which is identical throughout the family, and the precise glyphs used to write the numerals, which varied regionally. The first universally accepted inscription containing the use of the 0 glyph in India is first recorded in the 9th century, in an inscription at Gwalior in Central India dated to 870. Numerous Indian documents on copper plates exist, with the same symbol for zero in them, dated back as far as the 6th century AD, but their dates are uncertain. Inscriptions in Indonesia and Cambodia dating to AD
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