The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c11.145

c11.145

After Gerbert's death, little by little the scholars of Europe came to know the new figures, chiefly through the introduction of Arab learning. The Dark Ages had passed, although arithmetic did not find another advocate as prominent as Gerbert for two centuries. Speaking of this great revival, Raoul Glaber⁵ (985–c. 1046), a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Cluny, of the eleventh century, says: "It was as though the world had arisen and tossed aside the worn-out garments of ancient time, and wished to apparel itself in a white robe of churches." And with this activity in religion came a corresponding interest in other lines. Algorisms began to appear, and knowledge from the outside world found interested listeners. Another Raoul, or Radulph, to whom we have referred as Radulph of Laon,¹ a teacher in the cloister school of his city, and the brother of Anselm of Laon² the celebrated theologian, wrote a treatise on music, extant but unpublished, and an arithmetic which Nagl first published in 1890.³ The latter work, preserved to us in a parchment manuscript of seventy-seven leaves, contains a curious mixture of Roman and ġobār numerals, the former for expressing large results, the latter for practical calculation. These ġobār "caracteres" include the sipos (zero), 𝛗, of which, however, Radulph did not know the full significance; showing that at the opening of the twelfth century the system was still uncertain in its status in the church schools of central France.