Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Originally known as Gerbert of Aurillac (...) he was a prolific scholar and teacher. He endorsed and promoted study of Arab and Greco-Roman arithmetic, mathematics, and astronomy, reintroducing to Europe the abacus and armillary sphere, which had been lost to Latin (though not Byzantine) Europe since the end of the Greco-Roman era. He is said to be the first to introduce in Europe the decimal numeral system using Hindu-Arabic numerals. He was the first French Pope." [Wikipedia] "The first news of the marvel [the astrolabe] had been brought to the Latin world by Gerbert of Aurillac, an adventurous scholar who eventually became Pope Sylvester II . . . " [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 177] "Although we normally speak about their work as translation, these men, especially those of the first generation or two, were not translators at all, in our sense of the word. Like Gerbert, they were intellectually ambitious men driven to discover the treasures of their lifetimes, closer to explorers than anything else. They learned Arabic—or at least enough Arabic to allow them to work alongside their multilingual Mozarab and Jewish collaborators . . . " [Ornament of the World, p. 179]