Numbers, Maths, Computers and India

We were having a very exciting discussion about mathematics in a greek forum lately. This discussion started as a result of my recent mathematical questions, related mainly to its philosophy and not to its technique.

I am trying to develope a fascination for mathematics since I am going to have to learn it extremely well and this discussion really helped solve and raise questions that need to be answered. Mysteries always emit a certain magnetism and fascination, so the more of them.. the better.

And as if this werent enough I just bumbed into a very informative but also extremely funny and simple documentary on tv about the origin of numbers!

Its hard to believe that even though the alphabet has been invented many thousand years before the birth of Christ, numbers, in the form that we know them today, were invented just a couple hundred years BC!

The Romans had invented their own way of depicting numbers producing the Roman system, but the Indians were the ones that created the numbers that we know today as in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0. What is known as Arabic Numeral System is actually the Indian Numeral System that spread to the arabic world, to Africa and finally to Europe. The Indian System is a much more accurate system and it also included the number 0 which the Romans had not invented. The documentary showed an Indian Temple out of stone that had a writing on the wall about the size and the number of the flowers of the garden. It also contained the number 0 in it. It is said that the greatest invention of the Indians was the Zero!

Hilarious was the fact that the Romans were scared of Zero and they called in zifer=> cipher=>a mysterious code.

This documentary went on to introduce 2 great men of mathematics to the audience. Firstly, Fibonacci and secondly Leibnitz. I had heard about Fibonacci before only once, when I was reading Dan Brown's Davinci Code. Dan Brown was talking about the Fibonacci sequence in his book. Well, it seems that this guy was an excellent mathematician that brought and spread the indian numeral system to the west. Leibnitz was a german guy who made another extraordinary invention, the binary system. He wanted to build a system that would eliminate the possibility of human error and planed a machine that would fulfill that. He never managed to really built it but his knowledge was used to create the first electronic computer in Germany (I thought the first computer was built in the USA?). The name of that computer was Colloseus. Maybe it wasnt really a computer but an electronic calculator? Anyway, that documentary guy in the end went on to say that nowadays our life is ruled by the binary system since its what computers mostly use.