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1, digital introduction

The earliest tools used by human beings to count are fingers and toes, but they can only represent numbers within 20. When the number was large, primitive people mostly counted pebbles and beans. Gradually, people were not satisfied with counting by grains, so they invented the method of knotting to describe counting, and described counting on hides, bones, trees and stones.

In ancient China, counting was done with sticks made of wood, bamboo or bones, which was called counting chip. These counting methods and symbols gradually became the earliest digital symbols (numbers). Today, all countries in the world use Arabic numerals as standard numbers.

2. Historical origin

Some words. Biography of Southern History of Ren Fang: "Wang Jian came from a composition, which made the point correct and the characters determined." Song Weng Longyuan's poem "Ruilongyin" says: "The geese are flying in a horizontal array, and the servants are counted, and the dark clouds are hard to recognize."

Text representing numbers. There are two types of numbers in Chinese characters, namely' one two three four five six seven eight nine Ten' is lowercase, while'1234567890' is uppercase.

Symbols representing numbers. For example, Arabic numerals and Suzhou codes.

Quantity; Number. Han Beiping's African Night Slaves and Slave Coast: "Black Africa lost nearly 200 million people, which is really a creepy number."

3. Historical origin

Arabic numerals were gradually created by ancient Indians in their production practice.

In ancient India, urban construction needed design and planning, and sacrifices needed to calculate the movements of the sun, the moon and the stars, so mathematical calculation came into being. Around 3000 BC, the number of residents in the Indus Valley was relatively advanced, and the decimal calculation method was adopted.

By the third century BC, a complete set of numbers appeared in India, but the writing in different regions was not completely consistent. Brahmanism was the most representative: this set of numbers was widely used at that time. Its characteristic is that every number from "1" to "9" has a special word. Modern numbers are derived from this set of numbers. In this set of numbers, the symbol "0" (zero) has not yet appeared.

The number "0" did not appear until Gupta Dynasty (320-550 AD). The symbol "0" was already used in the mathematical book "The Manual of the Sun" completed in the 4th century A.D., when it was only a solid dot. Later, the dot evolved into a small circle "0". In this way, a set of numbers from "1" to "0" tends to be perfect. This is the great contribution of the ancient Indian people to world culture.

Indian figures first spread to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia and other neighboring countries of India.