Page:The Hindu-Arabic Numerals (1911).djvu/16

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
4
THE HINDU-ARABIC NUMERALS

among them such influential writers as Tartaglia[1] in Italy and Köbel[2] in Germany, asserted the Arabic origin of the numerals, while still others left the matter undecided[3] or simply dismissed them as "barbaric."[4] Of course the Arabs themselves never laid claim to the invention, always recognizing their indebtedness to the Hindus both for the numeral forms and for the distinguishing feature of place value. Foremost among these writers was the great master of the golden age of Bagdad, one of the first of the Arab writers to collect the mathematical classics of both the East and the West, preserving them and finally passing them on to awakening Europe. This man was Moḥammed the Son of Moses, from Khowārezm, or, more after the manner of the Arab, Moḥammed ibn Mūsā al-Khowārazmī,[5] a man of great

  1. ↑ "…& que esto fu trouato di fare da gli Arabi con diece figure." [La prima parte del general trattato di numeri, et misvre, Venice, 1556, fol. 9 of the 1592 edition. ]
  2. ↑ "Vom welchen Arabischen auch disz Kunst entsprungen ist." [Ain nerv geordnet Rechenbiechlin, Augsburg, 1514, fol. 13 of the 1531 edition. The printer used the letters rv for w in "new" in the first edition, as he had no w of the proper font.]
  3. ↑ Among them Glareanus: '* Characteres simplices sunt nouem significatiui, ab Indis usque, siue Chaldæis asciti .1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9. Est item unus .0 circulus, qui nihil significat.". [De VI. Arithmeticae practicae speciebvs, Paris, 1539, fol. 9 of the 1543 edition.]
  4. ↑ "Barbarische oder gemeine Ziffern." [Anonymous, Das Einmahl Eins cum notis variorum, Dresden, 1703, p. 3.] So Vossius (De universae matheseos natura et constitutione liber, Amsterdam, 1650, p. 34) calls them "Barbaras numeri notas." The word at that time was possibly synonymous with Arabic.
  5. ↑ His full name was 'Abū 'Abdallāh Moḥammed ibn Mūsā al-Khowārazmī. He was born in Khowārezm, "the lowlands," the country about the present Khiva and bordering on the Oxus, and lived at Bagdad under the caliph al-Māmūn. He died probably between 220 and 230 of the Mohammedan era, that is, between 835 and 845 A.D., although some put the date as early as 812. The best account of this great scholar may be found in an article by C. Nallino, "Al-Ḫuwārizmi,"' in the Atti della R. Accad. dei Lincei, Rome, 1896. See
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.