Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"He was a Persian and a native of Baghdad. . . . When the Indian numerals reached the Western world, to oust the Roman, they came to be known as 'Arabic numerals'. Al-Kharazmi was also the originator of algebra, which attained its highest development within the pale of the Islamic civilization, at the hands of the celebrated 'Umar Khayyam." [Balyuzi: Muhammad and the Course of Islam, p. 292] "The so-called Arabic numeral system also came to Latin Europe in this era, and through many of the same works that were being translated in Toledo by Ketton and others. Itself a Baghdadi adaptation of Indian systems—the Arabs themselves call them, more accurately, “Hindi numerals” —it made many advanced mathematical calculations possible with features absent in the Latin system, among them, crucially, the zero (from the Arabic sifr), as well as the use of positional notation, in which the position of the digit represents the magnitude of ten, a system that makes calculations substantially easier than with Roman numerals." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 180]