Hindu-Arabic numerals

In 1202, the Italian mathematican Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) introduced Arabic numerals to Europe.

Explanation

The word cipher is derived from the Arabic صفر sifr, which means "zero" and is taken from the Sanskrit sunya, which means "empty".

There has been discussion for centuries about whether or not the digit 0 is a number. Nowadays we call it a number, and for writing decimal numbers we just need it.

History

In his book Liber Abaci (book of arithmetics) he described the Fibonacci numbers, which probably were known for hundreds of years.