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Fact check: Is Mamdani introducing Arabic numerals to New York schools? (www.newsweek.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: "BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals." The post has almost 14 million views.

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[–] 8 points 11 months ago (16 children)

I dont understand this. When I was in Palestine, they definitely used different numerals.

Like, I guess they invented base 10? Or math? But the characters they use for numbers are absolutely different

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  • [–] 44 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Basically, what we call "Arabic Numerals", including the number 0, have their origin in India. Europe got them from Arabic scholars, and therefore called them "Arabic".

    The main factor is the decimal system of writing and having the concept of a zero in contrast to the odd, additive and subtractive writing of the Roman numerals, which didn't even know a 0, and made multiplication a pain and division nearly impossible.

    What glyph is actually used for a one, be it a 1 or a ١, is absolutely secondary.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    I want to correct something. They knew what nothing meant. They just didn't conceptualize the absence of things as a number. And honestly, it's a bit weird, but it is useful. You can't have 0 apples, but the concept is useful for math.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I have 0 apples right now, and most of the time!

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Arguably, sure. The way they'd understand it is you don't have apples though, not that you have zero. With our understanding, it makes some sense, but I'd say even today that's odd to say. It isn't wrong, but it is strange to say you posses everything in the universe (and anything else too), just in quantities of zero. It makes more sense to say you don't possess them.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago*

    It definitely makes sense in the same way that the famous experiment on abstract thought makes sense. Iirc, The experimenter a hundred years ago or more asked various people in different parts of Germany questions like, if a bird flies 20 miles an hour, about how long would it take to fly from Berlin to Frankfurt, and most people just couldn't entertain the question and would say that makes no sense a bird would never fly between those places.

    It's only with our education system today that more people could entertain the question, how long a bird would take to fly from Frankfurt to Berlin, even if no real bird would ever do it, or not bat an eye at possessing everything in the universe in quantities of zero.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Looking at Wikipedia, we're talking about western Arabic numerals in Europe/USA (TIL). Did you use one of the versions listed here as Eastern arabic numerals? Briefly reading the history, eastern is more common across modern Arabic regions.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals

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  • [+] -13 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Ok, well, this article is trying to call people dumb for not understanding a concept that is incredibly confusing to everyone

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago

    They're not calling people dumb for not knowing, they're calling them dumb for not investigating. If you hear a wild claim, you should investigate. This shouldn't still work because most of us here know it's been a running joke for at least 20 years in the US with continuous anti-Muslim and anti-middle-easter/Arabic sentiment and bills post 9/11.

    It shouldn't be incredibly confusing, either. It's fine to not automatically know that Amerocan/English refers to "western Arabic numerals" as simply "Arabic numerals" in shorthand. I didn't. That's why I briefly researched it when you said you had a different set of numerals in a region. Since I don't know exactly what to look for to validate my own searches, I genuinely asked you if what you learned matched what was in the Wikipedia page. I have no direct experience.

    People use shorthand all the time. It makes things confusing. I didn't know a "convection oven" was actually a "forced convection oven" until this year. In my head, it wasn't something I ever questioned because all my ovens have had the primary heater at the bottom, meaning convection would carry hot air upwards. Turns out, FCOs have a fan at the top to force better circulation. Surprise, this revolution of air fryers? They're just countertop [forced] convection ovens. Similarly, I have a gripe with people customizing cars with "coilovers". The majority of cars already have coil[spring]-over-[shock]s, but what they mean is "adjustable coilovers". It's a carryover from when cars did NOT have the various coilover designs as standard. Shocks outside coil springs, leaf springs, torsion springs, etc.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago

    incredibly confusing to everyone

    Is it? I think your confusion may come from living or studying abroad, which is understandable. But only the ignorant ones who passed school while asleep on this side of the world would be confused. Everyone is told that these are Arabic numerals as opposed to Roman numerals very early on.

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I think your confusion is the other side of what the article was discussing.

    The problem is, there have been a lot of number systems in the past. The one we currently use is based on the Arabic system. In common usage you would simply call them numbers. But in a technical sense, to distinguish from other numbering systems past and present, they're also called Arabic Numerals because that's their origin.

    Clearly this ignores the fact Arabic is still around and using real Arabic numbers and that is both confusing and maybe problematic. But I think the technical reason it sticks around is to acknowledge their source and have a more specific term when there is a need

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    If you look at the Hindu-Arabic numerals first used in Europe in the middle ages, they looked very much like modern numerals used in Arabic. This is the modern set:

    ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠

    Some of those will look more familiar if you rotate them 90 degrees CCW.

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