Ever since I moved to bangalore I have been always puzzled with characters used to display numbers. There have been many a times when I wanted to note down the number of an autorickshaw or decipher what was the route number of a bus. But I couldn’t. Thanks to the number being written in Kannada. But it was on Tamil New Year’s day which falls on April 14 and it happens to be yesterday that I came to know that Tamil too has a number system and it is completely different from that of Roman numbers.
Tamil number system did not use Zero, nor did they use positional digits (having separate symbols for 10, 100, 1000 et.al). Also the numbers were written in the manner they were spoken. To understand the Tamil number system and to learn more about the same visit this link http://www.gnanam.info/tamil/docs/Num_and_symbols.pdf
Doodle 