The History of Zero

The History of Zero

Introduction

Zero, zip, zilch - These words have helped us answer too many questions haven't they? Behind these apparently simple answers lays the tale of a thought which took so many centuries to be produced. We all know that man was not literate when he first came to this world. There was the Paleolithic Era, the Neolithic Era, and the Agricultural Revolution and so on. This example only makes us belief how it took time for man to develop, to move out of one age and move into the other. Similarly, mathematial ideas were transferred from one country to another, and took a lot of heads to get understood by people. Knowing and understanding the birth of zero is the foundation of the mathematical world to this day, and it took centuries before today's world could read Mathematics like it now does. The world did a very slow and steady progress in almost all areas of life, and mathematics like all other subjects of life had a similar story. Accounting, Calculus, the ability to solve algebraic calculations, and especially computers, would have all ceased to exist without the existence of zero. It is strange how its complexities revolved around something as simple and uncomplicated as a zero (Kaplan, 2000, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero).

Knowing about the discovery of zeros will take us through a series of questions like: Who revealed the zero? When did it first come to be seen? Where did it come from? History shows how the development of this concept made shadowy appearances and disappeared again as if math scholars had been searching it but could not recognize its importance even after seeing it.

Discussion

When we think of hundreds, thousands, or hundred thousand, what we will picture in our minds will be a digit with consecutive zeros. These functions of zero are positional; which means that three zeroes indicates one thousand, five zeroes indicate hundred thousand, when written after the digit one. Imagine what would happen if we miss a zero? Amounts will change drastically. Another example could be addition or reduction of a zero to your own pay, and imagine how good or bad we are supposed to feel like after that happens. The numeric system we make use of today was originated from Arab countries, though it came originally from India. In the past few centuries, people had been making use of symbols and figures in an attempt to create expressions for quantities. Measuring quantities and describing them in terms of units were very hard things to do (Menninger, 1992, p.401).

Zero was produced solely by the Babylonians, Mayans and Indians (despite the fact that a few professionals say the Indian numeric system had been influenced by the Babylonians). The Sumerians are said to be the first people who produced a system for counting to manage their stock counting E.g. cattle, horses and donkeys. This system of the Sumerians was transferred to the Akkadians in close to ...