Topic: notation
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.
We could, of course, use any notation we want; do not laugh at notations; invent them, they are powerful. In fact, mathematics is, to a large extent, invention of better notations.
TOPICS: notation, mathematics
SOURCE: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Addison-Wesley, Chapter 17 (1963)