a MUCH better photo of the icosahedron

[Brendan McKay]

* Gerald McGarvey <Gerald.McGarvey at comcast.net> [061218 09:17]:
> My take on this...
> 
> That they are at least read left to right is indicated by 1 being to the 
> left of the zero in the representation of 10.

No, that could be due to them writing numbers in little-ending order
rather than big-endian order.

My "proof" that the order really is left to right is that telephone
numbers are written that way.  Of course telephone numbers must be
entered in a particular order--backwards won't do.  In Arab countries
and Iran, telephone numbers are written left to right.

Thanks for the interesting links.

Brendan.
 
> Web searches show that nowadays for languages that use Arabic script,
> including Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, etc., numbers are written left to right, in 
> fact
> software for these languages needs to have bidirectional script support.
> 
> As to why they are written left to right, this document
> http://www.dsv.su.se/~hercules/papers/FarsiSum.pdf
> states 'Persian numbers have the same origin as the Latin numbers and
> are written left to right.' According to this article they originated in 
> India:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals
> (there's probably more to it)
> 
> I think manuscripts might show signs of the numbers being written left to 
> right.
> The writer would need to guess the amount of space needed, if they don't 
> guess
> correctly,  there could be a gap to the right of the number, or crunched up 
> numbers.
> That would pretty much be physical proof that numbers are written left to 
> right.
> 
> More examples...
> Persian (Farsi) numbers 0-10:
> http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/persian_num.gif
> 
> Kurdish (Kurdí) number 0-10:
> http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/kurdish_num.gif
> 
> Gerald
> 
> At 02:56 AM 12/17/2006, Ralf Stephan wrote:
> >Brendan McKay:
> >> Now here is an interesting trivium: Even though Persian and Arabic
> >> are written right to left, numbers are written left to right.
> >> You are all about to jump up and tell me that the order of writing a
> >> decimal positional system is arbitrary, so what I call left to right
> >> might as well be called right to left starting at the high-order
> >> digit. However, that is not correct and I reassert that numbers are
> >> written left to right.  Can anyone guess what my proof is?
> >
> >The fact that our number system is derived from Arabic,
> >and we use it left-to-right?
> >
> >(Not a hard proof but a good reason.)
> >
> >
> >ralf
>