Dashamana Today: Why the World Counts in Tens

The triumph of the Indian decimal system in global civilization

Reflect on how India's decimal system became the universal language of quantity, enabling modern science, commerce, and technology.

The First Outsider Who Noticed

In 662 CE, a Syrian bishop named Severus Sebokht sat in his monastery at Qenneshre on the Euphrates and wrote a letter. He was complaining about Greek scholars who treated their civilization as the only one that had ever thought carefully about the world. Then, midway through the complaint, he stopped to make a different point. He had recently seen the Indian method of arithmetic: nine digits, a circle for nothing, and a rule that made large numbers collapse to a single line on the page. He called the Indian discoveries more ingenious than those of the Greeks. He did not know the names Āryabhaṭa or Brahmagupta. He had seen the tools, not the men who made them. But what he saw was clear enough to stop his letter and insist, in writing, that the Indians had done something remarkable.

Sebokht's letter is the oldest non-Indian witness to the decimal system. It was written more than thirteen centuries ago. The ten symbols he was startled by are now on every screen on earth.

Every World Once Had Its Own Numbers

Before the Indian decimal system quietly took over the planet, the world was a patchwork of incompatible numeral systems. Romans stacked I, V, X, L, C, D, M and turned simple sums into adult arithmetic puzzles. The Greeks used letters of their alphabet, so alpha was one and beta was two and the entire thing ran out of elegance after iota. The Babylonians counted in sixty and built towers of wedge marks on clay. The Chinese used a sophisticated rod system but wrote it in columns. The Mayans had a beautiful base twenty system that died with their cities. Egypt, Phoenicia, Armenia, Ethiopia, each had their own numerals, and none of them could multiply two large numbers in a single page.