How the decimal place-value number system conquered Europe

I have been fascinated by numbers for as long as I can remember. I have very strong memories of enthusiastically solving simple arithmetical problems at the age of four in my first year at primary school. Rushing through each exercise to get to the next one. Later as I got older I would leaf through an encyclopaedia teaching myself to count to ten in different languages. I never lost that fascination and Grahan Flegg’s Numbers: Their History and Meaning (Andre Deutsch, 1983) and the, by him edited, Numbers Through the Ages (Macmillan, in association with the Open University, 1989) together with Georges Ifrah’s From one to zero: A universal history of numbers, translated by Lowell Bair (Viking Penguin, 1985) have all had a space on my bookshelves for decades. Alongside them sits Karl Menninger’s wonderful Number Words and Number Symbols (MIT Press, 1969). More recent additions are Stephen Chrissomalis, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (CUP, 2010) and his Reckonings: Numerals,…

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