Decimals were first put forward and used in China. As early as the third century A.D., Liu Wei, an ancient Chinese mathematician, put forward that the part below the integer that could not be named was called infinitesimal when solving a math problem.

The name of the decimal system was put forward by Zhu Shijie, an algebraic scientist of the13rd generation. In the 13th century, lowercase symbols representing decimals appeared in China.

In the west, decimals appear very late. It was not until the16th century that the French mathematician kravis first used the decimal point as a symbol to distinguish the integer part from the decimal part.