On Calculation with Hindu Numerals
composition: probableauthorship: secure
witness: twelfth-century Latin translations; the Arabic is lost
A short treatise explaining decimal place-value arithmetic carries the Indian numerals westward, and the Latin form of the author's name becomes the word algorithm.
- place-value arithmetic explained as a set of written procedures
- zero handled as a working part of the notation
- calculation moved from the counting board to the page
- the author's name becoming the word for procedure itself
The Arabic original is lost; the work survives through twelfth-century Latin versions beginning Dixit Algorizmi. It explains the nine figures and the zero, place value, and the procedures for addition, subtraction, doubling, halving, multiplication and division, including work with fractions. What it transmits is not a notation only but a way of computing on paper that replaces the counting board, and it is the channel through which European arithmetic eventually changed.
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