is the sum of the cubes of the first two non-zero positive integers 1 3 + 2 3 {\displaystyle 1

Circa 300 BCE, as part of the Brahmi numerals, various Indians wrote a digit 9 similar in shape to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a 3-look-alike. The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the sign @ encircles a lowercase a. As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller. Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle. The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic.The modern digit resembles an inverted 6. To disambiguate the two on objects and documents that can be inverted, they are often underlined. Another distinction from the 6 is that it is sometimes handwritten with two strokes and a straight stem, resembling a raised lower-case letter q. In seven-segment display, the number 9 can be constructed either with a hook at the end of its stem or without one. Most LCD calculators use the former, but some VFD models use the latter. While the shape of the glyph for the digit 9 has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the character usually has a descender, as, for example, in .