The path that the decimal number system took from India to medieval Europe
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The history of the early development of the place value decimal number system is long, complicated and full of holes and I shan’t be dealing with it here. It also throws up some important and unanswered questions. The Babylonians developed a place value number system as early as the beginning of the second millennium BCE but it was a sexagesimal or base sixty number system rather than a decimal base ten one.
The Babylonian system even had a placeholder zero in its later versions. This poses the question whether the Indians got the idea of a place value system from the Babylonians but it is simply not known. The Chinese also had a place value decimal number system but whether the Chinese influenced the Indians, the Indians the Chinese or both developed their systems independently is also not known.
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