"The idea seems so simple that its significance and importance is no longer appreciated."
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), mathematician
In 1202 Leonardo Pisano (c.1170-c.1240), known as Fibonacci, published his seminal work Liber abaci ("Book of the Abacus") and thus popularized Hindu- Arabic numbers in Europe. Although born in Italy, Fibonacci grew up in what is modern-day Beja, Algeria. Taught by Arab teachers, Fibonacci came in contact with our modern numeral system, which was devised in ancient India yet virtually unknown in Europe.
Until then the Roman numeral system had been prevalent throughout the continent. The system had been an improvement on the first recorded numbers found in Egypt—simple representative strokes for each digit, and a special symbol for ten—as well as the Greek (Attic) method of recording the first letters of the
numeral names. In the Hindu-Arabic base ten system, on the other hand, the single digits were represented by symbols whose value depended on placement (i.e., 2 in 200 being ten times greater than 2 in 20).
The first known inscriptions of these numbers date from the third century B.C.E., although whether they were used in a place-value system isn't clear. As early as the seventh century C.E. the system had reached the Arab world, recorded by mathematicians such as Al- Khwarizmi. The advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century accelerated the proliferation of Hindu- Arabic numerals, which over the centuries has become the closest thing to a universal human language.
