The Universal History of Numbers
From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer
A schoolteacher could not answer his pupils' question about where numbers came from, so he spent years finding out.
Ifrah was a schoolteacher whose pupils asked where numbers come from. Finding no satisfactory answer, he spent years assembling one, travelling and reading across every civilisation that counted. The book runs from tallies and body-counting through Babylonian, Egyptian, Mayan and Chinese systems to the decisive invention: positional notation with a zero, which arose in India and reached Europe as Arabic numerals. Obsessive, enormous, and the standard work.
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Alex Bellos
Then halfway through it changes and becomes largely about India because Ifrah realises that our own number system really originated in India. Our number system being what we call Arabic numerals and which are really Indian numerals.
Interview · November 2012
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