information:classification
Origins

Sometime around 600 CE, a change began in the writing of dates in the Brāhmī -derived scripts of India and Southeast Asia, transforming from an additive system with separate numerals for numbers of different magnitudes to a positional place-value system with a single set of glyphs for 1–9 and a dot for zero, gradually displacing additive expressions of numerals over the following several centuries.

When this system was adopted and extended by medieval Arabs and Persians, they called it al-ḥisāb al-hindī ("Indian arithmetic"). These numerals were gradually adopted in Europe starting around the 10th century, probably transmitted by Arab merchants; medieval and Renaissance European mathematicians generally recognized them as Indian in origin, however a few influential sources credited them to the Arabs, and they eventually came to be generally known as "Arabic numerals" in Europe. According to some sources, this number system may have originated in Chinese Shang numerals (1300 BC), which was also a decimal positional numeral system.