When I was a little girl, I thought the concept of zero had always been with humans, sort of like food and pain and sky.\u00a0 When I got a bit older, I learned that zero had been discovered\/invented rather recently in recorded history.\u00a0 The truth, as it often is, is a bit more complicated than that.<\/p>\n
Zero has two uses: as a positional place-holder in place-value systems, and as a number.<\/p>\n
The Hindu-Arabic numeral system<\/a> with a “0” for both meanings came to Europe in around 1200 AD via the Persian mathematician and polymath Al-Khwarizmi<\/a> (for whom “algorithm” is named) who described them in 825 AD.\u00a0 He might have built on work on place-value systems, which were described as early as 458\u00a0AD in India which wrote out the words for numerals.\u00a0 The first known, dated, unambiguous use of a glyph for 0 in India was on an inscription dated 876 AD.<\/p>\n Base-ten arithmetic and symbols for zeros had been scattered around for quite some time before then.<\/p>\n As early as 1800 BC, the Babylonians were doing complex math with a base-sixty system.\u00a0 (Their base-60 system lives on in how we count time and degrees in a circle.)\u00a0 At first, they left a space for place-values where we would put a 0, but by 700 BC, they were using special glyphs for placeholder in the middle of numbers (but not at the end!).\u00a0 They did not, however, use the 0 by itself to show a quantity of nothing.<\/p>\n Indians might have been using dots for a true zero as early as 30 BC, but the dating of that document is questioned.<\/p>\n Many other civilizations used a space for zero, including Incan (on quipu<\/a>), India around 300 BC, and China around 300 BC.\u00a0 The Mayans, as early as 36 BC, used special symbols to denote zero in their base-20 counting system, but not for a number.<\/p>\n In 130 AD, Ptolemy<\/a> used a circle with a bar over it as a true zero, but only for positions after<\/em> the decimal place, not for the integer part of numbers.<\/p>\n Links: Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a little girl, I thought the concept of zero had always been with humans, sort of like food and pain and sky.\u00a0 When I got a bit older, I learned that zero had been discovered\/invented rather recently … Continue reading