- UID
- 20
- Online time
- Hours
- Posts
- Reg time
- 24-8-2017
- Last login
- 1-1-1970
|

Starting from zero.
DepositPhotos
▼ Before there was nothing. Then, there was zero. So ubiquitous is the little oval, imagining life without it seems impossible. It’s the symbolic swim donut keeping math, science, and the internet afloat. But it wasn’t always there.
Accounting is an ancient profession. Sumer, the earliest known Mesopotamian civilization, had a positional numbering system, so there was no need for placeholders. A subsequent empire, Babylon, had different demands, so its number-crunching class used two empty wedges to represent a sum like 507. Across the world, the Mayan civilization came up with its own solution to a similar problem, placing a shell where modern mathematicians might place a 0. Some expertsargue these wedges are ground zero, to borrow a phrase, but most academicsattribute the invention of zero as a number—not as a warm body but a symbol in its own right, one that can be used in equations—to India.
Sometime around the year 400, Silk Road traders were tabulating the sum total of spices sold or woven rugs purchased with the aid of Bakhshali manuscript. Discovered by a farmer in 1881 in a field in present-day Pakistan, the weathered document looks like a bit of ancient math homework. But scholars at Oxford University believe it’s the earliest known evidenceof the invention of zero, represented in the manuscript by a filled-in dot.
The Bakhshali paper, which is written in a swirling Sanskrit, uses the dot as something between a placeholder and a number. (▪ ▪ ▪)
► Please, read the full article here: Source |
|