How come there are several widely used alphabets in the world (Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese etc) but only one set of numbers (Arabic) most of the world uses?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

The short answer is that the Hindu-arabic units are easier to use in algebra than the Roman and Babylonian number systems that were commonly used before it. However it took forever to fully adopt Hindu-arabic units, up through the late 1800s parts of France still used roman numerals.

I’m the book the house of wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili he sets aside a chapter for this topic. It is a pretty interesting book and written to be accessible to people who don’t understand math very well but like history.

You should go to your local library and see if they have a copy you can borrow.