"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 and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity."
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Quoted in H Eves Return to Mathematical Circles (Boston 1988).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace
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Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749 – 1827
Pierre-Simon Laplace (23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer, discoverer of the Laplace transform and Laplace's equation.
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