Scottish author and historian William Dalrymple used the India Today Conclave 2025 stage to unravel the history of numbers, according to him. He said that the history and the journey of mathematical numbers began in India and travelled all the way to Europe and the rest of the West through Arabian countries.
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00:00Now, many of you would know that the numeral zero comes from India.
00:06But the fact is that the Romans used to use Latin numbers, and even from one to nine,
00:12the numbers actually come from India, not directly from India to Rome, but via Arabia
00:18and the Arab world.
00:19So do you want to talk to us about how the numbers that all of us use today, and arguably
00:26the only universal language in the world, is actually an Indian export?
00:31So when India tries to project its soft power around the world, often, you know, the idea
00:35of yoga is referenced as something which has influenced everywhere.
00:39But you can make a much stronger case for Indian numbers for zero, for the decimal system,
00:45all ideas dreamt up in India, being this foundational beginning, and as you say, the nearest thing
00:52the human race has to universal language.
00:55Interestingly, very few people know this outside India, because at some point in the 18th and
01:0119th centuries, the Indian number system, which was always known, when the ideas are
01:06travelling, it's always called the Hindu system of number, or the modus and dorum in Europe,
01:11suddenly becomes Arabic numbers.
01:13And it's true that Europe gets them from the Arabs, but the Arabs get them from India.
01:18And what we have in front of us now is the oldest zero that is dated in the world, and
01:24that is Gwalior, you can see in the middle row, 270.
01:28Those are numbers that we can read today.
01:30That's the oldest zero there?
01:31That's the oldest zero.
01:32It's in Gwalior, just two hours on a train from Delhi.
01:36Now here is a map that should be in every school textbook in the world.
01:41But again, people don't know this.
01:43Brahmi is the original number system used in Ashoka's inscriptions, in the Ashoka pillars.
01:49That Gwalior inscription comes next, and again you can see the twos, the threes, the
01:55fours, and the sevens are very familiar.
01:58And then it goes in three different directions.
02:00You have the Indian number system continuing in Devanagari in this country, in the heartlands
02:08of Arabia you have the East Arabic numbers, and then crucially in Morocco and Islamic
02:14Spain you get what are called the West Arabic numbers developing out of this Gwalior system.
02:20By the 15th century it's looking a bit more recognisable, by the 16th century it sets.
02:26And the numbers on every mobile phone, on every laptop, everywhere around the world
02:31become set as, but they are, they come from India originally.
02:37And one of the extraordinary things when I've been touring this book around Europe and so
02:41on is that people all around America, in Britain, in Africa, in Australia, in Canada,
02:50they all know the stories of the Greek mathematicians.
02:53So everyone can tell you about Archimedes in his bath shouting Eureka.
02:58Kids of seven know this story.
03:00Everyone knows about Pythagoras.
03:04Everyone knows about Pi.
03:06But no one outside India knows about Aryabhata or Brahmagupta who were mathematicians of
03:13absolutely equal stature with Pythagoras and Archimedes, arguably more so, because they
03:19basically shepherded this number system that the whole world uses.
03:22In just nine figures plus zero you can express any number.
03:28And the ease with which you can do multiplication with these numbers with just the nine symbols
03:34is so much easier.
03:35I mean, try doing long multiplication or division with MCVXV1, the Roman system.
03:41So how does it get to the Middle East?
03:42Just one second.
03:43Can you go back to that?
03:44I think that is seriously mind-bending stuff.
03:47And I wish I had you as my history professor.
03:49That would have been just phenomenal because the manner in which you're able to bring these
03:52stories together just help them register much more.
03:56You're not telling us anything new, but it's the manner of the storytelling and bringing
03:59together.
04:00This is not controversial stuff.
04:01I mean, I don't think anyone challenges this.
04:03This is simple fact accepted by scholars everywhere.
04:06But it's not widely known.
04:08And it's extraordinary that we're here in the 21st century and everyone in America and
04:12Europe thinks they're using Arabic numbers.
04:15And that is actually quite a recent name, because I say it's recent.
04:18In the Middle Ages, people, when these numbers were being introduced, always referred to
04:22them as the modus indorum, the Indian method.
04:26So how do they get to the Middle East?
04:27This is a quick gallop through the passage.
04:30So this character, who many of you will know from Aladdin, the Disney Aladdin, he's actually
04:35a historic character, Jafar.
04:37He's the vizier of Baghdad.
04:39And the viziers of Baghdad are Sanskrit literate Buddhist abbots from Afghanistan, a family
04:47called the Pramukhs.
04:49When they convert to Islam and move to Abbasids, Pramukh, the Sanskrit word Pramukh, becomes
04:54Burmukh.
04:56And they call from, let's get the map up.
05:02They call from Sindh on the right of the map, an embassy that arrives in Baghdad in 776.
05:11And they have with them, at the request of the Burmukhs, the works of Aryabhatta and
05:17Brahmagupta.
05:18Aryabhatta, who comes up with the circumference of the earth and the distance of the earth
05:23from the sun in the 5th century during the Gupta period.
05:27Brahmagupta, his follower, who comes up with definitions of zero, the first man to define
05:32zero as an active number.
05:35These two crucial texts get taken to Baghdad and there they are translated by a guy called
05:44Al-Khwarizmi.
05:45Al-Khwarizmi writes a book with this incredibly long title, The Compendious Book of Calculating
05:51by Completion and Balancing According to Hindu Calculation.
05:55Now no one wants to use that, particularly in Arabic, that it sounds even longer.
06:00So it's known by a nickname and it's known as Algebra, which is the basis of our word
06:06algebra.
06:07While Al-Khwarizmi, who does the translation and who adds a bit of Euclid and adds a bit
06:13of his own ideas, it's not just a translation, that's to do it injustice, but it is a, he
06:19unravels this complicated Sanskrit mathematics and incredibly simple Arabic prose.
06:25Al-Khwarizmi gives his name to algorithm.
06:29So algebra and algorithm, two names, numbers, I mean algorithm is obviously the word of
06:35the moment.
06:36Whenever we talk about Elon Musk or Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is, we talk about
06:41algorithms.
06:42It's at the heart of modern mathematics and computing.
06:45It comes from India.
06:46This is not controversial.
06:48This is a simple matter of fact.
06:50How does it get from the Arab world to Europe?
06:53That's the next stage.
06:54So you've got from Sindh to Baghdad, so from the right-hand corner of the map to the middle
07:00of the map.
07:01Al-Khwarizmi's translation, which is very simple, very clear prose in Arabic, travels
07:07through North Africa, from Egypt to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and into Islamic Spain.
07:15And by the 10th century, Christian monks in Spain are beginning to use this system.
07:20But astonishingly, it remains the Latin numbers that are used in Northern Europe and Italy
07:28and France and Britain up until the 12th century.
07:32Now at that point, if you look at the top of Italy, you can see Pisa.
07:36Pisa sends a trade mission to Algeria, and the guy who leads that mission brings his
07:43son with him.
07:45The son goes to the local school.
07:47He learns Arabic.
07:48He learns the Arabic number system.
07:50And when he goes back home...
07:52Fibonacci.
07:53It's Fibonacci.
07:54Luckily for us, it's Fibonacci.
07:57Fibonacci brings the number system that he's learned in Algeria to Italy.
08:05It comes to the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor that he's written this book called
08:10the Liber Abachi, explaining the modus indorum, the Indian method.
08:15And he is called to the court in Castel del Monte, where the court astrologer, who I'm
08:22glad to say is a Scotsman called Michael Scott, gets him to make it more user-friendly.
08:29He says, you've got to include less theoretical.
08:31You've got to use weights and measures, usury, double accounting, all the basic methods of
08:40this Indian mathematical developments.
08:44And the second edition of Liber Abachi goes absolutely crazy.
08:49It's the reason that the Medici found the Medici Bank, and later it becomes into the
08:55hands of Piero della Francesca, my friend.
08:58Nick Booker is in the audience here somewhere, who gave me a lot of the...
09:01Here he is in the front.
09:03He has a particularly fond of a character called Luca Pacioli, who Piero della Francesca
09:09gives his mathematical text based on Fibonacci.
09:14Pacioli takes it to Milan, where he shares it with his flatmate.
09:18His flatmate is Leonardo da Vinci.
09:22So it's like a relay race, Leonardo da Vinci to Piero della Francesca, Piero della Francesca
09:28to Fibonacci, Fibonacci to Al-Khwarizmi in Baghdad.
09:33Al-Khwarizmi to Brahmagupta, sitting in Manabu in Rajasthan, from Brahmagupta to Aryabhatta,
09:42sitting in Pataliputra in the 5th century.
09:44So this relay race of Indian ideas, and again, this is something that everyone should know.
09:50It's such basic and important stuff that I don't understand in the sense how we've got
09:56to this point where people outside India don't know this at all.