Arithmetic is the beginning of mathematics, and arithmetic begins with counting. To count, one must first name numbers. Early Greeks and Romans aped Sanskrit names for small number, but the largest number they named was a myriad, puny compared to giant numbers like parardha and tallakshana found in ancient India. This difference is inexplicable on the Aryan conquest fantasized to explain away the similarity. This book explains why early Greeks were inferior even in their abacus-based pebble arithmetic, contrary to their incessant false glorification by school texts, Wikipedia and chatbots, etc.

To overcome this chronic European inferiority in arithmetic, a 10th c. pre-Crusading pope imported “Arabic numerals”, also called “algorismus” after the Latin name of the 9th c. al-Khwarizmi, who wrote Hisab al Hind (Indian Arithmetic). The pope wanted Christians too to write large numbers, to catch up with their Muslim neighbours, who had learnt it from India.

But the other sophisticated features of Indian arithmetic—place-value, efficient algorithms, zero, negative numbers, and fractions—continued to puzzle and elude Europeans for another 900 years, until the end of the 19th c. Why? Because of hubris, due to their destructive religious superstition of their own supremacy. This book tells the funny story of how Europeans so comically applied this superstition, for centuries, to assert the superiority of their primitive pebble arithmetic, with hilarious consequences.

The laughter shatters Macaulay’s boast of the “immeasurable superiority” of Whites/West, in math and science. Read this book to learn how to bust that racist and colonial self-glorification through false history, and how to counter that psychological attack on the self-esteem of the colonised. This book also outlines how to make math easier and better today.