Arabic numerals Libya to Morocco. Arabs, on the other hand, call the base-10 system (not just these digits) "Hindu numerals", referring to their origin in India. This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the "Hindi numerals", namely the Eastern Arabic numerals ( - - - - - - - - - ) used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages (e.g. Devanagari: ). The European acceptance of the numerals was accelerated by the invention of the printing press, and they became widely known during the 15th century. Early evidence of their
Hindu–Arabic numeral system zero. In China, Gautama Siddha introduced Hindu numerals with zero in 718, but Chinese mathematicians did not find them useful, as they had already had the decimal positional counting rods. In Chinese numerals, a circle (〇) is used to write zero in Suzhou numerals. Many historians think it was imported from Indian numerals by Gautama Siddha in 718, but some Chinese scholars think it was created from the Chinese text space filler "□". Chinese and Japanese finally adopted the Hindu–Arabic numerals in the 19th century, abandoning counting rods. The "Western Arabic" numerals as they were in common use in Europe