9
In the beginning, 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.
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 
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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.
Nine is the fourth composite number, and the first composite number that is odd. 9 is the highest single-digit number in the decimal system. It is the third square number (32), and the second non-unitary square prime of the form p2 and first that is odd, with all subsequent squares of this form odd as well.
By Mihăilescu's theorem, 9 is the only positive perfect power that is one more than another positive perfect power, since the square of 3 is one more than the cube of 2.
Nine is the number of derangements of 4, or the number of permutations of four elements with no fixed points.[1]
