A lot of Indians got annoyed that they are double barrelled as Hindu Arabic, when the original source was India. The arabs then took it and created other concepts. Its like calling English alphabet English-American.
The modern English alphabet descends from an ancient Proto-Sinaitic script, which was adopted and transformed over time by the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, and then underwent some further evolution into the script English speakers use today. Of course, this is extremely simplified and the development wasn't this linear, but it's a rough sketch.
Just as it would be odd and inaccurate to call the modern English alphabet Proto-Sinaitic or Phoenician, it's inaccurate to call the modern number system Indian because, as you note the "arabs then took it and created other concepts". What we use today is the modified system, it's not purely of Indian creation.
As a fun example: I grew up calling a water body near my home country as Khaleej Al Arabi. The "Arabian gulf".
It's only when I came to the US that I realised people around the world, thanks to an effective campaign by the Persians, call that same waterbody the Persian Gulf.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_naming_dispute
Edit: actually, turns out it was the Arab nationalism that preferred to adopt "Arabian gulf" in the 1960s. Turns out I was sold Arab propaganda even after being told about the globally recognized name, that it was a Persian campaign.
A funny example of this was that in America, if you googled "Arabian gulf", the top result was a fake old school Internet Explorer 404 page with the title "Error: Gulf not found. You may be looking for Persian Gulf"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220437752/figure/fi...
Propaganda might be a strong word. It was more that some Arabs I knew in the west believed that Persians were trying to change the name, and not that the Arabs were the ones who actually changed it in the 60s.
I was googling around now, I didn't realize Trump also used Arabian gulf recently: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4983604/dona...
It's a hot button topic!
It's also a well-known fact that Al-Jabr took some mathematical aspects from India and spread them across the Arabic countries. From there they eventually reached the west. That's how Algebra got its name.
Your “Al-Jabr” (Short for Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala, or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) was a book, written by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who was Persian. Like other scholars writing in Arabic at the time, he read translations of Greek and Indian sources, while also doing significant original work.
The book of his which explained and advocated Indian numerals was a different book (not “Al-Jabr”). We have this in Latin translation so the original title is unknown, but Wikipedia speculatively lists Kitāb al-Jam‘ wat-Tafrīq bi-Ḥisāb al-Hind (The Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation).
[Edit: I just read the linked blog post which this discussion is ostensibly about, and noticed that the above was already described there. I assume you didn’t read it. You might want to start with that.]
If you want to play a game of “whose culture first invented everything”, we can trace a whole heck of a lot back to the Sumerians (and for what we can’t trace, who knows what still lies on some buried cuneiform tablet). But of course there were then crucial additional advancements made by Akkadians, Egyptians, Hellenes, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Italians, French, English, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Canadians, Japanese, .....
Mathematics is international and spreads easily. No culture can uniquely claim to have “invented” something as massive as “algebra”, even if we limit ourselves to topics taught in secondary school.
Also, I do not know who said, "math is queen of all sciences".
>No culture can uniquely claim to have “invented”?
No. It can. It should. And It will.
You misunderstand my comment. Read it again:
>What we use today is the modified system, it's not purely of Indian creation.
The current numeral system used is not purely of Indian creation. This chart shows the progression of the ancient Indian numeral system to the one in use today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Numeration-brahmi_fr.png
The ancient Indian system was adopted by Arabic scholars who in turn modified it into an early version of the form used today, although you can see that even after the general forms of the numerals were "settled" they've continued to evolve to become the ones familiar to us now.
So no, not purely of Indian creation, anymore than the modern English alphabet, as noted above, is purely a Phoenician creation. Like most concepts, it's been adopted and modified across the ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hindu%E2%80%93A...
If the Babylonians developed a place value number system with a zero in it before the Indians did, then it's more likely the Indians copied it from the Babylonians and changed it to base 10, than it is that the systems were developed independently, because the two civilizations were in close contact with each other. Number systems are exactly the sort of thing that ancient traders would share with each other -- it only needs to happen once during the many hundreds or thousands of such contacts.
The onus of proof is hence on you to prove any such single contact didn't happen before claiming "Hence, purely of Indian origin". It's better to write, as the article did:
> whether the Indians got the idea of a place value system from the Babylonians [...] is simply not known
The moral of this is that human history is not as easily partitioned as people would like.
(Before I get accused of being anti-India, I'd like to make it clear that I'm Indian)
While you are Indian, I often feel that many Indians also tend to lack also unfortunately basic understanding of Indian history, perhaps it's the incessant cultural demand to pursue other subject, so far as to even claim that there's no such thing as "Indian" history, but rather merely the history of different people in a region arbitrarily created by the British.
I'm not accusing you of that, but simply pointing that being Indian doesn't shield you from the accusation of either being "anti-India" or lack of knowledge.
Nothing is original. If that's you're claim then it's not a valid argument, and doesn't really address the situation other introduce some existentially reductive platitudes.
(Much as I like history ... now, not when I was young, there's so much of it!)
It's an odd combination to have Adunaic and Sindarin in such a name. Maybe it should be Tar-Curunir or Ar-Saruman?
> The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing (Arabic: الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wal-muqābala)
What the words meant originally is not entirely clear. Something like to set, adjust, reckon, I reckon.
PS: And as was pointed out, the Author is said to be from Persia
Please don't break the site guidelines like that, when they ask you quite explicitly not to:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In this case, your comment would be excellent if you'd simply delete that bit. Saying sorry doesn't make it better, because the other person typically doesn't hear that part.
https://cdn.britannica.com/668x448/60/91960-004-42DF23AB.jpg
> script and alphabet
I don't think there is a notable distinction. But sure enough, the ancient Greeks used several alphabets, some different letters ... and different forms for equal letters, which therefore cannot be called the same letters.
Also, the word "firangi" means foreigner in Hindi, but it also means "Frankish person". Should Englishmen in India be upset that they are being grouped with the French?
It's nationalistic nonsense to fight against both the historical reality and the natural flow of ideas over millennia, and does indeed smack of an inferiority complex. It's not a slight or a slur to acknowledge the complexity of the historical reality, and the achievements of ancient Indian peoples are no less impressive, anymore than the Greek adaptation and expansion of older Babylonian geometric concepts diminishes those.
Look, I don’t want to insult anyone. That’s just a conclusion I’ve made over the years. My background is also such that my native people always complain about past stuff like that instead of changing the here and now
But regardless, the modern number system is one of the seminal achievements in human history, along with the wheel, alphabet, paper, etc. It shouldn't be too surprising that people want correct attribution/credit.