Who’s Afraid of Arabic Numerals? | Opinion - The New York Times

Before there was a Western civilization, there was Islamic civilization by Mustafa Akyol, regular contributing writer, The New York Times.

Photo: Sally Deng

Should Americans, as part of their school curriculum, learn Arabic numerals?

CivicScience, a Pittsburgh-based research firm, put that question to some 3,200 Americans recently in a poll seemingly about mathematics, but the outcome was a measure of students’ attitudes toward the Arab world. Some 56 percent of the respondents said, “No.” Fifteen percent had no opinion.

Those results, which quickly inspired more than 24,000 tweets, might have been sharply different had the pollsters explained what “Arabic numerals” are.

There are 10 of them: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9...

In the early 13th century, an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci, who studied calculation with an Arab master in Muslim North Africa, found the numerals and their decimal system much more practical than the Roman system, and soon popularized them in Europe, where the figures became known as “Arabic numerals.”

Meanwhile, the discipline of al-jabir became “algebra,” and al-Khwarizmi’s name evolved into “algorithm.”...

That is why you dial your phone using “Arabic numerals.” And that is just the tip of a big iceberg of ideas and values shared between Islam and the West.

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Source: The New York Times