The Odyssey of Numbers (2/3) | Conquering the World | ARTE

Imagine that behind the numbers you use every day—on your phone, at the grocery store, at the ATM—lies a story of travel, mistrust, and even accusations of black magic. In the Khajuraho temples in India, a tiny 10th-century inscription preserves the original version of our numbers: those ten symbols, from 1 to 9, plus an empty circle, the famous zero. Today, we call them “Arabic numerals,” but in reality, they originated in India, and for centuries, Europe rejected them, favoring much more complicated systems. And this is where the twist comes in: if you think that the superiority of Indo-Arabic numerals was obvious from the start, you should know that for at least 500 years, they were viewed as suspicious, even diabolical, tools, and those who used them risked being accused of witchcraft. The story begins in India, where astrology played a pivotal role. Each planet was associated with a number, and manipulating those numbers was considered a way to shape one's destiny. This detail, which today seems superstitious, actually gave rise to our modern mathematics. The real game-changer came with the invention of zero as a number, a revolutionary idea: before, if you wanted to calculate 5 minus 6, you couldn’t, because the concept of nothing didn’t exist. Zero made it possible to view numbers as a line, to think about negatives and decimal fractions—in short, it created the mathematics we know today. But why are these symbols called “Arabic” if they come from India? In the 9th century, the scholar Al-Khwārizmī—whose name later gave rise to the word “algorithm”—brought Indian numerals to Baghdad, where the House of Wisdom translated texts from all over the world. The Arabs always called them “Indian numbers,” but in the cities of the Maghreb, a visual variant emerged: the “goubar” form, meaning “dust,” because the numbers were drawn on sand tablets, as wax could not be used because it melted in the sun. From there, this form spread along the Mediterranean coast and was adopted in Spain, where the Latins renamed them “Arabic numerals,” even though they were a transformation of Indian numerals. Medieval Europe, however, was enamored with Roman numerals: symbols carved in stone, V and X like the fingers of a hand, reserved for a select caste of “calculators” who studied for years to master them. Performing a multiplication could take hours. When the young French monk Gerbert of Aurillac – who later became Pope Sylvester II – proposed using Arabic numerals with jetons (tokens) on a board, he was accused of black magic. Even as Pope, his innovation was ignored for centuries because the new system seemed too simple to be “honest.” Among ordinary people, on the other hand, arithmetic was even more rudimentary: engravings on sticks or tablets, with no numbers or letters, just notches and Vs reminiscent of fingers. The real breakthrough came with Leonardo Fibonacci, the son of a Pisan merchant who sent him to Algeria to learn the methods of Muslim traders. Upon his return, he wrote Liber Abaci, the first major European textbook explaining how to use Arabic numerals to solve practical problems: currency exchange, weight conversions, and business calculations. In essence, this was the text that brought mathematics from the monasteries to the merchants' stalls. And it was precisely the merchants, grappling with the commercial revolution of the 13th century, who became the true ambassadors of the new system. When the continent discovered the secret of calculation written on paper—also an Arab invention, itself learned from the Chinese—everything accelerated. With the advent of Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press in the mid-15th century, Arabic numerals were finally standardized: they became identical across Europe. And it was precisely in manuals for merchants that, for the first time, the symbols + and – appeared, which had originated in Germany to abbreviate words and make calculations even simpler. This is how written algebra as we know it today came into being. A curious detail: the current shape of our “2” comes from a token turned over by mistake, and the “5” originated from the design of an inverted cup. And then there is Albrecht Dürer, the artist-mathematician who included a magic square in his engraving Melencolia, with the date and his initials hidden among the numbers: a testament to how, from the Indian temple to the Renaissance atelier, mathematics has become art, philosophy, and a personal code. Today, we take it for granted that numbers are universal, but it took eight centuries of journeys, translations, resistance, and even accusations of witchcraft for the West to embrace them. But the real question that few people ask is: What would have happened if Europe had continued to use only Roman numerals? We probably would never have seen the birth of modern banking, nor of science as we know it. The key phrase to remember is this: the Indian zero has changed the world more than any king or conquest. If this story resonates with you, on Lara Notes you can press I'm In — it's not a 'like,' it's your way of saying: This idea is now mine. And if tomorrow you tell someone that Fibonacci brought Indian numerals to Italy for the purposes of commercial calculation, on Lara Notes you can tag that person with Shared Offline — because the best conversations deserve to be remembered. This journey through numbers is brought to you by ARTE and has saved you about 45 minutes of video.