It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols,

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit.
But its very simplicity, the great ease
which it has lent to all computations,
puts our arithmetic in the first rank
of useful inventions, and we shall
appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when
we remember that it escaped
the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the
greatest men produced by antiquity.

-Pierre Simon de Laplace, French mathematician, 1749-1827

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