Why would Arabs write letters in one direction, and the numbers in the opposite direction? Since it obviously didn’t make sense I did a short Internet research and found out that so called Arabic numbers are actually Indian numbers or Hindu numerals.
One thing didn’t make sense – while Arabic language is written from right to left, Arabic numbers are written from left to right. It was in Arabic and since I don’t speak Arabic the only thing I could understand from it were the numbers. Many years after finishing school, while on a trip to Middle East, I was looking at the poster glued on the wall of a building. She told us Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) were much more advanced that the Roman ones (I, II, III, etc.) and said the great invention of Arabic mathematicians was the number 0 (zero).
Long time ago when I was learning mathematics in elementary school, teacher told us that the numbers we use are called Arabic numerals.
