Did You Know...
A Little History
The first records of the use of numbers is from the ancient Sumerian
civilization of Mesopotamia. Baked clay tablets were used for commercial
transactions in the period 4000 to 1200 BC. The Sumerians had a positional
and based number system but unlike our use of the base 10 (decimal), they
used base 60! They also did not have the concept of zero (0). The zero came
to the Western world from India via the Arab world which obtained it in the
9th or 10th century AD. Western mathematics did not use the notion of
negative numbers until approximately the 13th century. Fibonacci applied
negative numbers to the idea of economic losses.
Compiled from http://www.hebb.cis.uoguelph.ca/~deb/27190/
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