While Latin Alphabet is dominant, Chinese and Arabic letters are widely used as well, along with several others. But most everyone in the world uses Arabic numerals, even though there are others. Why is that?
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The arabic numerals are superior to other number systems that existed before them.
The trick of using the position of a numeral as a multiplier for it’s value comes from india, and reached europe through arabia (hence the name), and was always combined with those numerals being used.
Old number systems like roman numbers or the chinese numbers relied on using more and more symbols the larger your numbers get, because if you want to write a billion without using 1000 times the million symbol you need a new symbol in those systems where the value of all symbols is just added. Also stuff like long multiplication/division only works with arabic numerals. In roman numbers multiplication requires some tricks and a solution lookup table for a few basic operations.
For letters the opposite is true, languages all sound different, so a script that is designed specifically for a language works better for it. Look at polish or czech script that uses latin letters to write a slavic language, it’s full of diacritics and multi-letter combinations for sounds that would be a single letter in cyrilliv
Writing systems are symbols of national identity and major parts of cultures. People don’t want to give it up. Numerals are just one small part of it.
There’s more than one set of numbers. But most math going back to medieval times is based on work from Arabian scholars who invented some important things like algebra. So instead of trying to translate this work into different number sets, people who could do math just started using Arabic numerals.
Older systems like Roman numerals and Abjad numerals still exist but are usually only used for lists and fancy clocks, not normal counting.
Confusingly, in Arabia they tend to use Eastern Arabic numerals which are not the same as the (Western) Arabic numerals we use. Same base 10 counting system, but entirely different symbols. 5 looks like 0, 0 looks like a dot, etc.
Other counting systems like the Indic system in South Asia are primarily the same as western Arabian numerals but at high numbers have different groups – e.g a hundred thousand (100,000) is 1 lakh (1,00,000) in Indic numerals.
While it’s true that most of the world still uses exclusively Arabic numerals, there are other systems that still exist. Consider how common Roman numerals are/were. We use Chinese numbers in Japanese quite a bit. As well:
一二三四五六七八九十廿百千万億兆 etc
But in general, you’re right – it’s mostly Latin.
Because there are many languages but only one math.
Arabic numbers are just 11 pieces of information. The 10 digits and the fact that being positioned before another digit means “times 10”.
This gives you the ability to express any possible number and the ability to understand every number anyone from any culture has written down.
Compare this with different alphabets. If a German speaker learns the Korean writing system he’ll still only know German. He could transliterate German words into the new system and a Korean speaker could pronounce it but would not understand it. To be able to communicate one still has to learn the others language and vocabulary. Which is extremely messy as pretty much every pair of languages have some fundamental differences.
Europeans used to use Roman numerals but they switched to Arabic because it’s much better. Have you seen what large computations look like in Latin. It’s amazing that the Romans managed with it without running out of papyrus
I remember when some people from Facebook wanted to ban the use of Arabic numbers in schools in the US, because ‘arabic’.
The number system was Indian, but taken by the Arabs to Venice.
Should be called the Indian number system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system
Arabic numerals refer to the idea of position being important. 313 is three hundreds, 1 ten, and 3 ones. It’s much simpler to do math with Arabic numerals than roman numerals where the equivalent is CCCXIII.
0123456789 are the latin/western characters used to write those numbers. There are other characters used in other writing styles, ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ for example in Arabic.
The world uses the Arabic *number system*, and the same math in general, because it was the best available and we all standardized on it. However plenty of scripts out there have their own versions of Arabic numbers, so it’s not like everyone is writing 0-9 (in figures or words) exactly the same.
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