Numerals

Mathematics is hard to do without symbols for numbers, or numerals. In the first place, it was necessary for humans to invent symbols for numerals.

You may ask who invented the numerals that the whole world use today for mathematics. That is a long story. For sure different parts of the world had used different numerals and it is still the case today.

Please refer to this Wiki page for more information.

Early numerials often do not have a symbol for zero. It turns out that the concept of zero is not intuitive. In ancient India,
they used an empty space for zero, or just a simple dot.
Later it spread West to the Middle East and East to China and evolved into the modern 0.

Other numerals exist. For example, the Roman and the Egyptian numerals are displayed on the right. Clicking on the images leads to more information. Visit this page to see ancient Chinese numerals.

Often we refer to the numerals we use as digits. With a single digit, we can write down just ten different numbers! We still have to figure out how to write down larger numbers.