Although the 

Codex Vigilanus described an early form of Arabic numerals (omitting 0) by 976 AD,

Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) was primarily responsible for spreading their use throughout Europe
after the publication of his book Liber Abaci in 1202. He wrote, "The method of the Indians
(Latin Modus Indorum) surpasses any known method to compute. It's a marvelous method. They do
their computations using nine figures and symbol zero".[9]
In the Middle Ages, arithmetic was one of the seven liberal arts taught in universities.
The flourishing of algebra in the medieval Islamic world, and also in Renaissance Europe, was an
outgrowth of the enormous simplification of computation through decimal notation.
Various types of tools have been invented and widely used to assist in numeric calculations. Before
Renaissance, they were various types of abaci. More recent examples include slide
rules, nomograms and mechanical calculators, such as Pascal's calculator. At present, they have
been supplanted by electronic calculators and computers.

Arithmetic operations[edit]
See also: Algebraic operation
The basic arithmetic operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, although
arithmetic also includes more advanced operations, such as manipulations of percentages,[3] square
roots, exponentiation, logarithmic functions, and even trigonometric functions, in the same vein as
logarithms (prosthaphaeresis). Arithmetic expressions must be evaluated according to the intended
sequence of operations. There are several methods to specify this, either—most common, together
with infix notation—explicitly using parentheses and relying on precedence rules, or using
a prefix or postfix notation, which uniquely fix the order of execution by themselves. Any set of
objects upon which all four arithmetic operations (except division by zero) can be performed, and
where these four operations obey the usual laws (including distributivity), is called a field.[10]

Addition