00:00Now, many of you would know that the numeral zero comes from India.
00:06But the fact is that the Romans used to use Latin numbers, and even from one to nine,
00:12the numbers actually come from India, not directly from India to Rome, but via Arabia
00:18and the Arab world.
00:19So do you want to talk to us about how the numbers that all of us use today, and arguably
00:26the only universal language in the world, is actually an Indian export?
00:31So when India tries to project its soft power around the world, often, you know, the idea
00:35of yoga is referenced as something which has influenced everywhere.
00:39But you can make a much stronger case for Indian numbers for zero, for the decimal system,
00:45all ideas dreamt up in India, being this foundational beginning, and as you say, the nearest thing
00:52the human race has to universal language.
00:55Interestingly, very few people know this outside India, because at some point in the 18th and
01:0119th centuries, the Indian number system, which was always known, when the ideas are
01:06travelling, it's always called the Hindu system of number, or the modus and dorum in Europe,
01:11suddenly becomes Arabic numbers.
01:13And it's true that Europe gets them from the Arabs, but the Arabs get them from India.
01:18And what we have in front of us now is the oldest zero that is dated in the world, and
01:24that is Gwalior, you can see in the middle row, 270.
01:28Those are numbers that we can read today.
01:30That's the oldest zero there?
01:31That's the oldest zero.
01:32It's in Gwalior, just two hours on a train from Delhi.
01:36Now here is a map that should be in every school textbook in the world.
01:41But again, people don't know this.
01:43Brahmi is the original number system used in Ashoka's inscriptions, in the Ashoka pillars.
01:49That Gwalior inscription comes next, and again you can see the twos, the threes, the
01:55fours, and the sevens are very familiar.
01:58And then it goes in three different directions.
02:00You have the Indian number system continuing in Devanagari in this country, in the heartlands
02:08of Arabia you have the East Arabic numbers, and then crucially in Morocco and Islamic
02:14Spain you get what are called the West Arabic numbers developing out of this Gwalior system.
02:20By the 15th century it's looking a bit more recognisable, by the 16th century it sets.
02:26And the numbers on every mobile phone, on every laptop, everywhere around the world
02:31become set as, but they are, they come from India originally.
02:37And one of the extraordinary things when I've been touring this book around Europe and so
02:41on is that people all around America, in Britain, in Africa, in Australia, in Canada,
02:50they all know the stories of the Greek mathematicians.
02:53So everyone can tell you about Archimedes in his bath shouting Eureka.
02:58Kids of seven know this story.
03:00Everyone knows about Pythagoras.
03:04Everyone knows about Pi.
03:06But no one outside India knows about Aryabhata or Brahmagupta who were mathematicians of
03:13absolutely equal stature with Pythagoras and Archimedes, arguably more so, because they
03:19basically shepherded this number system that the whole world uses.
03:22In just nine figures plus zero you can express any number.
03:28And the ease with which you can do multiplication with these numbers with just the nine symbols
03:34is so much easier.
03:35I mean, try doing long multiplication or division with MCVXV1, the Roman system.
03:41So how does it get to the Middle East?
03:42Just one second.
03:43Can you go back to that?
03:44I think that is seriously mind-bending stuff.
03:47And I wish I had you as my history professor.
03:49That would have been just phenomenal because the manner in which you're able to bring these
03:52stories together just help them register much more.
03:56You're not telling us anything new, but it's the manner of the storytelling and bringing
03:59together.
04:00This is not controversial stuff.
04:01I mean, I don't think anyone challenges this.
04:03This is simple fact accepted by scholars everywhere.
04:06But it's not widely known.
04:08And it's extraordinary that we're here in the 21st century and everyone in America and
04:12Europe thinks they're using Arabic numbers.
04:15And that is actually quite a recent name, because I say it's recent.
04:18In the Middle Ages, people, when these numbers were being introduced, always referred to
04:22them as the modus indorum, the Indian method.
04:26So how do they get to the Middle East?
04:27This is a quick gallop through the passage.
04:30So this character, who many of you will know from Aladdin, the Disney Aladdin, he's actually
04:35a historic character, Jafar.
04:37He's the vizier of Baghdad.
04:39And the viziers of Baghdad are Sanskrit literate Buddhist abbots from Afghanistan, a family
04:47called the Pramukhs.
04:49When they convert to Islam and move to Abbasids, Pramukh, the Sanskrit word Pramukh, becomes
04:54Burmukh.
04:56And they call from, let's get the map up.
05:02They call from Sindh on the right of the map, an embassy that arrives in Baghdad in 776.
05:11And they have with them, at the request of the Burmukhs, the works of Aryabhatta and
05:17Brahmagupta.
05:18Aryabhatta, who comes up with the circumference of the earth and the distance of the earth
05:23from the sun in the 5th century during the Gupta period.
05:27Brahmagupta, his follower, who comes up with definitions of zero, the first man to define
05:32zero as an active number.
05:35These two crucial texts get taken to Baghdad and there they are translated by a guy called
05:44Al-Khwarizmi.
05:45Al-Khwarizmi writes a book with this incredibly long title, The Compendious Book of Calculating
05:51by Completion and Balancing According to Hindu Calculation.
05:55Now no one wants to use that, particularly in Arabic, that it sounds even longer.
06:00So it's known by a nickname and it's known as Algebra, which is the basis of our word
06:06algebra.
06:07While Al-Khwarizmi, who does the translation and who adds a bit of Euclid and adds a bit
06:13of his own ideas, it's not just a translation, that's to do it injustice, but it is a, he
06:19unravels this complicated Sanskrit mathematics and incredibly simple Arabic prose.
06:25Al-Khwarizmi gives his name to algorithm.
06:29So algebra and algorithm, two names, numbers, I mean algorithm is obviously the word of
06:35the moment.
06:36Whenever we talk about Elon Musk or Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is, we talk about
06:41algorithms.
06:42It's at the heart of modern mathematics and computing.
06:45It comes from India.
06:46This is not controversial.
06:48This is a simple matter of fact.
06:50How does it get from the Arab world to Europe?
06:53That's the next stage.
06:54So you've got from Sindh to Baghdad, so from the right-hand corner of the map to the middle
07:00of the map.
07:01Al-Khwarizmi's translation, which is very simple, very clear prose in Arabic, travels
07:07through North Africa, from Egypt to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and into Islamic Spain.
07:15And by the 10th century, Christian monks in Spain are beginning to use this system.
07:20But astonishingly, it remains the Latin numbers that are used in Northern Europe and Italy
07:28and France and Britain up until the 12th century.
07:32Now at that point, if you look at the top of Italy, you can see Pisa.
07:36Pisa sends a trade mission to Algeria, and the guy who leads that mission brings his
07:43son with him.
07:45The son goes to the local school.
07:47He learns Arabic.
07:48He learns the Arabic number system.
07:50And when he goes back home...
07:52Fibonacci.
07:53It's Fibonacci.
07:54Luckily for us, it's Fibonacci.
07:57Fibonacci brings the number system that he's learned in Algeria to Italy.
08:05It comes to the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor that he's written this book called
08:10the Liber Abachi, explaining the modus indorum, the Indian method.
08:15And he is called to the court in Castel del Monte, where the court astrologer, who I'm
08:22glad to say is a Scotsman called Michael Scott, gets him to make it more user-friendly.
08:29He says, you've got to include less theoretical.
08:31You've got to use weights and measures, usury, double accounting, all the basic methods of
08:40this Indian mathematical developments.
08:44And the second edition of Liber Abachi goes absolutely crazy.
08:49It's the reason that the Medici found the Medici Bank, and later it becomes into the
08:55hands of Piero della Francesca, my friend.
08:58Nick Booker is in the audience here somewhere, who gave me a lot of the...
09:01Here he is in the front.
09:03He has a particularly fond of a character called Luca Pacioli, who Piero della Francesca
09:09gives his mathematical text based on Fibonacci.
09:14Pacioli takes it to Milan, where he shares it with his flatmate.
09:18His flatmate is Leonardo da Vinci.
09:22So it's like a relay race, Leonardo da Vinci to Piero della Francesca, Piero della Francesca
09:28to Fibonacci, Fibonacci to Al-Khwarizmi in Baghdad.
09:33Al-Khwarizmi to Brahmagupta, sitting in Manabu in Rajasthan, from Brahmagupta to Aryabhatta,
09:42sitting in Pataliputra in the 5th century.
09:44So this relay race of Indian ideas, and again, this is something that everyone should know.
09:50It's such basic and important stuff that I don't understand in the sense how we've got
09:56to this point where people outside India don't know this at all.
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