How Did The System Of Counting Originate?

Today it looks simple rather natural that to two pennies we add another two, the sum total of the belonging is four pennies. It has taken the mankind millions of year to think and arrive at this. In practice, it is a difficult to teach children, the concept of numbers.

In ancient times, man had no system of numbers to tell the holding of animals. They used to put a pebble or a piece of stone into a bag for each head of animal. More the animals, more stones he had in his bag. In Latin the word ‘calculus’ means stone. The word calculate is derived from calculus: Later on tally marks were used to count. One would scratch a line or tally mark for each object counted, but the words were not available to express or tell the holding.

The fingers come next, probably a step further in the development of number system. The word digit comes from the Latin word ‘digitus’, meaning finger. Since we have ten fingers which lead to the general use of “10” in system of numbers.

In ancient times there was no single number system used in the world. Some systems were based on 12, others were based on 20, some on 60; there were still others based on 2, 5, and 8. The system invented by the Romans was widely used by the people of public. It was about 2000 years ago and used until about 16th century. We still use it on clocks, and show the chapters in books. But, it is a complicated system.

The number system in use now was invented by the Hindus in India quite thousands of years ago and then taken to Europe about the year 900 by Arab traders. This system provides for writing numbers with the nine digits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 to show how many, and the Zero. It is a decimal system that is built on the base 10.