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
Roman numerals today in some dictionaries, they are long out of use. Chronograms, messages with dates encoded into them, were popular during the Renaissance era. The chronogram would be a phrase containing the letters , , , , , , and . By putting these letters together, the reader would obtain a number, usually indicating a particular year. By the 11th century, Arabic numerals had been introduced into Europe from al-Andalus, by way of Arab traders and arithmetic treatises. Roman numerals, however, proved very persistent, remaining in common use in the West well into the 14th and 15th centuries, even in accounting