Dr. Kim Plofker is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, NY, USA. Her research focuses on the history of mathematics and astronomy in India and its connections with science in the Islamic and early modern European world. She authored Mathematics in India (Princeton, 2009), and her most recent book (with Clemency Montelle) is Sanskrit Astronomical Tables (Springer, 2018). She is currently co-editing a volume on medieval mathematics in Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Cultural History of Mathematics series.

Abstract of the lecture: Development of the Indian Numerals (and how they became “Arabic”)

The Indian decimal place-value system with zero, the ancestor of the ubiquitous decimal system of today, emerged in the early Common Era and rapidly spread through South and Southeast Asia. Its subsequent transmission to the West as “Indian numbers” was accompanied among its non-Indian recipients by many diverse hypotheses about its origins. Tracing the evolution of such hypotheses sheds light on how the field of history of science has developed and responded to increasing knowledge about the ancient world beyond the limits of classical antiquity.