BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani is expected to require ALL New York Elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals

dorian · Guru

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani is expected to require ALL New York Elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals

Magnarc · Guru

I can see why you are laughing Dorian. Only in America.

There's a lot of gullible folks out there in internet land.

-- Edited by Magnarc on Tuesday 25th of November 2025 08:16:47 AM

Roy E · Senior Member

Having lived for 14 1/2 years in the ME, Oman and the UAE, most of the locals there incorrectly believed that the Farsi (Persian) number system is Arabic. I showed the Arabs that worked for and with me that our "English" numeral system was in fact Arabic but I guess Mandami is a fair bit behind the times.

Whenarewethere · Guru

They will really sh_t themselves when told any half decent watch or clock should be using Roman Numerals!

dorian · Guru

Roy E wrote:
Having lived for 14 1/2 years in the ME, Oman and the UAE, most of the locals there incorrectly believed that the Farsi (Persian) number system is Arabic. I showed the Arabs that worked for and with me that our "English" numeral system was in fact Arabic but I guess Mandami is a fair bit behind the times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals

The Eastern Arabic numerals, also called Indo-Arabic numerals or Arabic-Indic numerals as known by Unicode, are the symbols used to represent numerical digits in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in the countries of the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world), the Arabian Peninsula, and its variant in other countries that use the Persian numerals on the Iranian plateau and in Asia.

The numeral system originates from an ancient Indian numeral system, which was reintroduced^{[to whom?]}^[when?] during the Islamic Golden Age in the book On the Calculation with Hindic Numerals written by the Persian mathematician and engineer al-Khwarizmi, whose name was Latinized as Algoritmi.

Each numeral in the Persian variant has a different Unicode point even if it looks identical to the Eastern Arabic numeral counterpart.

Roy E wrote:
... I guess Mandami is a fair bit behind the times.

I think you missed the joke. Read the news article. A bunch of Trump's rightards latched onto a parody and mindlessly propagated it as real news.