The original infographic material was rearranged by National Geographic Historia and adapted to its layout needs. Both the infographic and the magazine article, refer to the appearance and divulgation of the Arabic or Indian numbers (numerals) in Europe during the Middle Ages. The replaced images, taken from the Infographics90 infographic, show the evolution in the graphics of the numbers (among which the one of number 5 stands out) and the images of two mathematicians or accountants (one of them with an abacus and the other one doing annotations on a smooth surface). The Arabic numeral system dramatically simplified the calculations and the representation of quantities in excess of one million units. Before generalization of this system, the results of arithmetic operations were represented by Roman numerals.
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