During the XIXth and early XXth century a debate on the origins of the decimal place value notation crossed different millieus and frontiers, sparkling philological studies, editions of mathematical texts and serving as a backdrop to narrations on the world history of mathematics.
In between 1819 and 1829 the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) wrote and published two texts on the history of numbers that were subsequently translated and studied by the historian of arabic mathematics, Franz Woepcke (1826-1864), who further discussed them in his 1863, Mémoire sur la propagation des chiffres indiens. Woepcke’s study was then used in the mathematcian’s Hermann Hankel’s (1839-1873) posthumous Gezchichte der Mathematik in Alterthum und Mittelalter.
Alexander von Humboldt’s history of mathematics is singular in many points, two will hold our attention here: First, he closely links thoughts of numbers to thoughts on language. Second he pleads for the use of algebra when explaining ancient mathematical thought, as a way of underlying the universal rationality of man’s mind. This paper, after exposing Humboldt’s theories will further look at its posterity in Woepcke and Hankel’s works. The more general aim of such a study being to highlight how homogenized points of view on nations, languages, religions, numbers or algebra shaped what came to be at the end of the nineteenth century a standard discourse on the history of numerical transmissions.