- 丢得和令胡之论确实高，我还在等令胡说瑛姑呢。再多的细论，容我
先把儿子的生日打发了再说。先抄两小段吧：
The written digits that we use today, and that we call Arabic numerals, came not from the Arabic Near East but from the western Arabs of Morrish Spain. They were called the Gobar numberals. They traveled an extraordinarily long road: from India to the Near East to Arabia to North Africa to Spain. The journey took eight hundred years.
Gradually, the Indian origin of positional notation was forgotten in the West, and only its immediate source was remembered. Thus, the Indian digits became known as Arabic numberals and the zero was thought to be an Arabic invention. The Arab calculators were the first to promote and disseminate the Indian system widely; Arabic tradition continues to credit India as its true source.
That's why in Arabian world I cannot see Arabian numbers. --xw
Some three centuries later, in 773, an Indian ambassador came to Baghdad bearing treasures: a knowledge of digits and computation. The Caliph al-Mansur(c.709-c850) wrote the first work to present the new knowledge in Arabic, the Book of Addition and Subtraction by Indian Methods. This book was the means by which Indian computation arrived in Europe. Immensely influential and translated into Latin many times, beginning in the 12th century, its renown was such that the method of computation it presented became known as algorism, from Algorismus, the Latin name of al-Khwarizmi. A Latin poem, Carmen de algorismo, written around 1200, states:
"We call the present art by which we use such Indian digits for the number of two times five algorismus."
from "Numbers, the Universal Language".
令胡对西诗的瞎论确实不敢苟同，令胡读读布莱克和济慈，没感觉是
你自己的问题。另外，这一线标题不好，易成误会，再开线。
xw