When we consider... that the dot is found for zero in the Bakhsālī man — The Hindu-Arabic Numerals

"Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born at Rome c. 475. Not many generations after his death, the period being one in which historical criticism was at its lowest ebb, the church found it profitable to look upon his execution as a martyrdom. He was accordingly looked upon as a saint, his bones were enshrined, and as a natural consequence his books were among the classics in the church schools for a thousand years. It is pathetic, however, to think of the medieval student trying to extract mental nourishment from a work so abstract, so meaningless, so unnecessarily complicated, as the arithmetic of Boethius."

"[I]t is one of the mistakes of scholars to believe that they are the sole transmitters of knowledge. ...[T]he characters, the methods of calculating, the improvements that took place from time to time, the zero when it appeared, and the customs as to solving business problems, would all have been made known from generation to generation along... trade routes from the Orient to the Occident. [I]t was to the tradesman and the wandering scholar that the spread of such learning was due, rather than to the school man."

"The numerals had existed, without the zero, for several centuries; they had been well known in India; there had been a continued interchange of thought between the East and West; and warriors, ambassadors, scholars, and the restless trader, all had gone back and forth, by land or more frequently by sea, between the Mediterranean lands and the centers of Indian commerce and culture. Boethius could very well have learned one or more forms of Hindu numerals from some traveler or merchant."

"Avicenna (980-1037 a.d.)... relates that when his people were living at Bokhara his father sent him to the house of a grocer to learn the Hindu art of reckoning, in which this grocer (oil dealer, possibly) was expert. Leonardo of Pisa, too, had a similar training."

"It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, for Strabo lays down the route, saying that all who make the journey start from and traverse and before taking the direct road. The products of the East were always finding their way to the West, the Greeks getting their ginger from Malabar, as the Phoenicians had long before brought gold from Malacca."

"The Indian use of subscript dots to indicate the tens, hundreds, thousands, etc., is established by a passage in the Kitāb al-Fihrist (987 A.D.)... The numeral forms given are those which have usually been called Indian, in opposition to ģobār. In this document the dots are placed below the characters, instead of being superposed... The significance was the same."