# Is there a reasoning behind the depiction of the numbers as they are $\{1$, $2$, $3$, $4$, $5$, $6$, $7$, $8$, $9\}$?

Is there a reasoning behind the depiction of the numbers as they are: $$\{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9\}$$

Is there any other form of depiction for $6$ and $9$ other than $VI$ and $IX$?

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If anything, this is a question about notation rather than number theory, so I'm editing the tag. – Alex Becker Aug 22 '12 at 3:30
How about '一二三四五六七八九'? – Frenzy Li Aug 22 '12 at 3:31
$一二三四五六七八九$, looks great. is it japanese. – Rajesh K Singh Aug 22 '12 at 3:33
It's Simplified Chinese but not sure about Japanese. Every culture has its own way to write numbers. I.E. Roman: I II III IV V VI VII VII IX. (they are more of numbers than digits) – Frenzy Li Aug 22 '12 at 3:34
I was always given to understand that the Babylonians had something to do with it. But I see Wikipedia lays most of the "blame" on the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. (According to that article using zero came fairly late in the evolution of the system.) – Daniel R Hicks Aug 22 '12 at 15:57

The first few are derived from ways to make $n$ marks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Origins

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At this link you’ll find links to descriptions of almost three dozen numeral systems. Some of them share a common origin with our familiar numerals $0,1,\dots,9$, and some are completely different in origin. The Brahmi numerals are the direct graphic ancestors of our numerals; as you can see from the picture there, the first three were basically just tally marks, but the rest have no obvious pictorial significance.

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The image below depicts numbers in Japanese.

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