mountain man wrote:
> mAsterdam wrote:
>>mountain man wrote:
>
>>>IMO there are at least 2 roads
>>>to database systems theory:
>>>the road of theory and
>>>the road of practice.
>>
>>The users of roman numbers could do
>>very well without 0 - at least that's
>>what their generations thought.
>>I suspect that in the early days of the change
>>to arab numbers they looked on 0 as being of value,
>>albeit theoretical.
>
> As an aside, AFAIK the arab numbers are Indian.
>
> Brahmagupta's (b.598 A.D) treatise Brahma-sputa-siddhanta
> was translated into Arabic under the title Sind Hind.
>
> For several centuries this translation mained a standard
> text of reference in the Arab world. It was from this
> translation of an Indian text on Mathematics that the
> Arab mathematicians perfected the decimal system and
> gave the world its current system of enumeration which
> we call the Arab numerals, which are originally Indian
> numerals.
>
> Sorry about the tangentiation,
Nice :-) tangentiate as much as you like.
Received on Tue May 17 2005 - 17:55:32 CDT
