Highly intellectual and given to abstract thinking as they were, one would expect the ancient Indians to excel in mathematics. Europe got its early arithmetic and algebra from the Arabs-hence the ‘Arabic numerals’—but the Arabs themselves had previously taken them from India. The astonishing progress that the Indians had made in mathematics is now well known and it is recognized that the foundations of modem arithmetic and algebra were laid long ago in India. The clumsy method of using a counting frame and the use of Roman and such like numerals had long retarded progress when the ten Indian numerals, including the zero sign, liberated the human mind from these restrictions and threw a flood of light on the behaviour of numbers. These number symbols w’ere unique and entirely different from all other symbols that had been in use in other countries. They are common enough to-day and we take them for granted, yet they contained the germs of revolutionary progress in them. It took many centuries for them to travel from India, via Baghdad, to the western world.A hundred and fifty years ago, during Napoleon’s time, La Place wrote : ‘It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position, as well as an absolute value; 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 when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of greatest men produced by antiquity.The origins of geometry, arithmetic, and algebra in India go back to remote periods. Probably to begin with there was some kind of geometrical algebra used for making figures for Vedic altars.Questions :1. Where was the foundation of modem arithmetic and algebra was laid?2. Which country gave the zero sign to the world?3. How did the Indian numerals travel to the western world?4. Who appreciated the ingenious Indian numerals?5. Who are the two greatest men produced by antiquity?6. What go back to remote periods in India?7. For what was geometrical algebra used?8. Locate from the passage the words which mean the following—(i) surprising(ii) the quality of being great and impressive.