Indians were not unfamiliar with the concept of zero, or nothing. The Babylonian number system hit India, another land with an advanced indigenous culture, sometime around the 3rd century CE, and the meeting was momentous. Out of Babylon and into India: Zero becomes a Number It would take the brilliant mathematical minds of India to figure out how the zero actually worked, to take it out on the highway and see how it performed “under the hood” of mathematical processes. It didn’t figure into mathematical computation. And, more crucially, the dot for zero was really just a place-holder. First off, they never used the dot at the end of a number, so a number like our 160 would be notated the same as 16. Okay, it was a small start, but we had to begin somewhere. The most significant change was to acknowledge that simply inserting a space to denote emptiness was inefficient at best, and the Babylonians began to add a small mark, such as a dot, to the middle of large numbers where a space had been used before. Besides Babylon, the Mayan civilization in Meso-America is known to have used an eye-like symbol denoting “empty” or “none” in its elaborate calendar system. The use of a “zero-concept” rose independently in several sites around the developing world. But the adopted system had its limits, and so over several centuries the Babylonians gradually improved upon the Sumerian’s complicated methodology for their purposes. The advanced culture of Babylon gathered great minds and great ideas, and a useful counting and numbering system was much needed. It did not have a zero, rather using a space to denote absence.Ĭomplicated though it was, this system was useful enough to be passed down over centuries and arrive in Babylon for its use sometime around 400 BCE.
This system used 60 as its base – as opposed to the base-10 system with which we’re familiar – and used separate systems for counting physical objects (like sheep) and areas or volumes. To search for the origin of the concept of zero it’s necessary to go back to a time approximately 5,000 years ago when the Sumerians devised the first counting system. The Birth of the Zero: Nothing Becomes Something in Ancient Babylon However, higher math functions, such as calculus, were inconceivable then and would remain so in a world without a zero. While there was no zero in the functions of the abacus, its design did allow for mathematical processes to be carried out accurately. These challenges were only partly improved through the abacus, whose use was widespread in the early centuries BCE. It might seem impossible, then, for a merchant to have assessed proper payment or determined correct inventory, and indeed, historians acknowledge that the lack of zero presented challenges for math. Zero just didn’t exist in the arithmetic of the ancient world. While there was a concept for nothing in most early languages, there was no computation using zero in mathematics. And yet creating our modern world was literally impossible without it.
In fact, there was hostility – on both philosophical and religious grounds – to the very concept of nothing.
But in the era of Roman numerals, which lasted far into the Middle Ages, there was no recognition of the integer 0 (or zero). M used to mean 1,000, D 500, C 100, and so on down to the lowly I, which signified the number one.
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