Arabic numerals in its entry in the "Oxford English Dictionary", which helps to distinguish it from "Arabic numerals" as the Eastern Arabic numerals. Alternative names are Western Arabic numerals, Western numerals, Hindu–Arabic numerals and Unicode calls them digits. The decimal Hindu–Arabic numeral system with zero was developed in India by around AD 700. The development was gradual, spanning several centuries, but the decisive step was probably provided by Brahmagupta's formulation of zero as a number in AD 628. The system was revolutionary by including zero in positional notation, thereby limiting the number of individual digits to ten. It is considered an important
Numerals in Unicode three Unicode characters semantically represent mathematical constants: , the , and . Other mathematical constants can be represented using characters that have multiple semantic uses. For example, although Unicode includes a character for "natural exponent" ℯ (U+212F) its UCS canonical name derives from its glyph: ; and the mathematical constant π, 3.141592.., is represented by . The Western Arabic numerals also appear among the compatibility characters as rich text variant forms including bold, double-struck, monospace, sans-serif and sans-serif bold. and fullwidth variants for legacy vertical text support. Rich text parenthesized, circled and other variants are also included in the blocks: