![]() By the 17th Century, zero emerged triumphant as the basis of Cartesian co-ordinates (the x and y graphs you meet in school) invented by the French philosopher Descartes. Just to put it in context, by then Oxford University in England had been around for centuries and the printing press was just up and running.īoth, no doubt, helped zero to flourish as an idea in mathematics, and it formed the basis of some of the most incredible scientific and technological methods we use today. Incredibly it wasn’t until the 15th Century that zero, along with all the other Arabic numbers, was finally accepted. And negative numbers legitimised the concept of debt and money lending. What’s more, zero was seen to set a dangerous precedent because it was the gateway to negative numbers. Zero could easily be doctored to become nine, and why not add a few zeros on the end of a receipt to inflate the price? In 1299, zero was banned in Florence, along with all Arabic numerals, because they were said to encourage fraud. Division remains a bit tricky, but that particular challenge spurred a whole new wonderful field of mathematics, as we’ll see later. You could add it, subtract it, multiply it. In mathematics, not only could shunya be used as a placeholder to signify nothing in that position, but you could use it in calculations just like any other number. However, according to Indian mysticism, zero is round because it signifies the circle of life, or as it was also known ‘the serpent of eternity’.īack in India, the astronomer Brahmagupta was the driving force behind zero’s path to greatness in the 7th Century. Before I looked into the concept of zero for The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, I’d always imagined the circle was a hole, representing nothing. ![]() That symbol was called ‘shunya’, a word still used today to mean both nothing as a concept, and zero as a number.Īlthough all the other numbers we use today have changed hugely throughout history in terms of their shape, zero has always been a circle. If you think about ‘nirvana’ it’s the state of nothingness – all your worries and desires go. For the Babylonians, it was two little dart symbols on their sides.Īccording to maths author Alex Bellos, India was the perfect setting: “The idea of nothing being something was already deep in their culture. ![]() Ancient scholars employed it as a symbol to represent the absence of a number, like the way we use a zero in 101 or 102 to signify that there are no multiples of 10 in the middle position. Zero as a concept has been around since ancient times, popping up in Babylonian and Mayan inscriptions, when it was used it to calculate the passage of the seasons. ![]() Download a two-part programme about ‘The Hunt for Nothing: part one & part two. This article is inspired by the BBC Radio 4 programme The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry.But to comprehend why and to understand zero’s power, you first have to understand its birth and its battles, because zero’s path to greatness was a rocky one. For one thing, it allows us to forecast the future. This cheeky yet powerful number has caused more controversy and provided more delight than any other digit I know. ![]() Nothing lies at the heart of science, engineering and mathematics. ![]()
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