The life of numbers

This book masterfully illustrates the life course of numbers, taking the reader on a walk through a museum of historical artifacts, manuscripts, and works of art. The authors recount how numbers lived in now extinct civilizations, with photographs of archaeological remains, Roman coins, preromanic manuscripts, incunabula; how people learned to use numbers to count, showing Renaissance mercantile arithmetic books; and how numbers evolved into the Western counting system that we use today, with the first recorded usage of the current arithmetic symbols.