Many discoveries originating from South Asia have been
wrongly attributed to mathematicians from Europe and the Arab world:
2014 Fields Medal Winner and Princeton Mathematician
Manjul Bhargava notes
“The way we write
numbers today originated in India. I’m not talking about the exact shapes of
the numbers, but the system of the way we write numbers. The history is that it
developed in India, it got transported to the Arab world and then later it got
transported to Europe. Europe learned it from the Arab world so they called it
the Arabic numerals. The US continued to call it the Arabic numerals. And now
India also sometimes calls it the Arabic numerals!
Of course, we had
to wait for the U.S. to take a leadership role in changing things as far as the
correct names – India won’t. In the U.S., about a decade ago, in textbooks,
they decided to call it the Hindu-Arabic numerals with the eventual goal of
changing it to Hindu numerals. And then when the United States changes it, then
maybe India will!”Related: Profile of Manjul Bhargava
http://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2014/08/profile-of-math-genius.html