Sorry I have no cite. Actually I think I heard it on satellite TV. (You can learn a lot on satellite TV;).) But ancient people didn’t know about the number Zero. Apparently even for scientifically advanced civilizations, the concept of Zero isn’t self-evident. I am not a scientist. So obviously that is all I know.
So who was the first to discover zero? And don’t just leave it at that. I know this GD. But tell us the whole story:).
:):):):)
Not much “real” help, sorry, but I think I remember “the Arabs” but with no dates or citations that I can remember.
Possibly India, it seems:
The Arabs merely exported and popularized the Hindu counting system, which adapted the Babylonian system but used base 10 instead of base 60.
Charles Seife, in his* Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea*, can’t pinpoint the origin to a particular person or even date. He says a symbol for zero was definitely in use by the ninth century, but some evidence indicates that it had been extant since the seventh century.
Edit: I simulposted with PatrickLondon. I used Seife’s book as reference, which was published in 2000. Apparently they’re pushed it back since then. But definitely the Indians.
Zero was a bit of a philosophical debate in ancient Greece. Is zero a number? Can you have a number of something if you don’t have any of that something? To ancients, having none of something wasn’t a number of something, it was a complete lack of something. In order to have a number of something, you had to have at least one.
Historically, India gets credit for inventing zero as a number. A Hindu astronomer named Brahmagupta gets credit for inventing a symbol for zero in 628 (according to The Google) but a guy named Pingala had a system that had a zero as a placeholder several hundred years prior to that.
If you start to ask what exactly qualifies as zero then things get a bit more complicated. Ancient Egyptians had a symbol for zero that they used in measurement. It meant the zero or baseline of a measurement, but was not used for things like counting money. Ancient Babylonians used punctuation as place holders in accounting. But again, like the Egyptian symbol, these punctuation placeholders were not used generically and were only used for their specific purpose in accounting. Many other early civilizations had a zero of sorts, but similar to these examples, it was only used in specific instances and was not a general representation of the number zero.
What is interesting is that some folks had the concept of negative numbers before they had the concept of zero as a number. Again, looking at the Egyptians, the zero baseline for measurement could then take measurements in either direction from that baseline. And many accounting systems had ways of handling negative quantities.
But basically, as a true representation of the number zero, India gets credit for it.
Yes, zero is a concept that took up more more time in mathematical consideration than the mere process of place holding in arithmetic. Seife doesn’t get to the Indians until chapter 3 of his book, 63 pages in. And he mentions negative numbers first.
It’s been invented more than once. The Mayans had a zero and presumably did not acquire it from the Hindu system the way we did in Europe.
The Wikipedia entry credits Egyptians ca. 1770 BCE and Mesoamericans (possibly Olmecs) ca. 500 BCE as using zero or a blank as a placeholder. Use of zero as a number seems to date from India ca. 200 BCE or CE 460, take your pick.
Before the zero was discovered, the ancients’ computers had to be programmed with only ones.
Why do we credit the discovery to India when India is a construct of the just the last 80 years. Prior to that it was a land mass with varied kingdoms and principalities of varying sizes, diverse people who spoke different languages and who were constantly in battle with each other or being conquered by invading armies.
It would be more appropriate to call the inventor of zero as ancient people of the Indian subcontinent rather than India which is a newish country in its present political form.
Answers above mention ancient Egyptians and Incas, not Egypt and Peru. Same rule should apply to India dont you think.
They do, however, mention “ancient Greece”.
We know, we’re all pedants here. No one said " India, the modern nation-state."
If mere blanks are treated as zeros, then the Sumerian abacus supposedly invented by 2300 BC may beat these records. All beads down, on an abacus, means that column is zero. (The alleged Sumerian abacus. Lots of webpages and books refer to it, but it might be a good Googling exercise to see if any point to, you know, actual evidence for it.)
The alleged Sumerian abacus allegedly used alternating ten and six as its bases, so (1,1,1,1,1,1) would equal 36000+3600+600+60+10+1.
Because it’s no such thing. The concept of India as a geographical area is a lot older than the country. See also: Germany, France, Italy, Spain.
Blank spaces standing for zero digits in place-value number systems date back to the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE in Mesopotamia (base-60 number system) and to at least the 1st millennium BCE in China (base-10 counting-rod system).
Placeholder symbols for zero in an empty place of a place-value number were used in base-60 numbers in the 1st millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, and carried over in their adoption by the Greeks.
Greek use of a base-60 zero symbol may possibly have influenced, in the early centuries CE, the Indian development of the circular base-10 zero symbol that’s the ancestor of the one we all use today, but more likely the Indian symbol was in use centuries earlier to represent “nothing” in more general contexts.
The decimal place-value system with zero, from which the current global numeral system is directly descended, was fully developed in India by at least the middle of the first millennium CE, although the oldest surviving inscriptions showing the Indian zero are some centuries younger.
R.C. Gupta’s article “Who Invented the Zero?” in Ganita Bharati 17 (1995) is an excellent survey of these developments, but I can’t find a copy online except a preview version in this reprint.
And yes, the name “India” (or some variant, such as “al-Hind” in Arabic) has been used in various languages for millennia to refer to the South Asian subcontinent or some part thereof, so it’s not anachronistic to call that region “India” in earlier historical periods as well. Similarly, it’s not wrong to refer to ancient “Greece”, even though the modern Greek state goes back only to 1830.
And as a political entity. Tamerlane, one of our own Dopers, didn’t extend his Empire far into India but his agnatic descendants built the Mughal Empire. (Cite: The Taj Mahal wasn’t built by just a few hundred villagers.)
And thousands of years before that, Ashoka the Great ruled almost the entire sub-continent.
Of course Europeans were confused about “India” long before the SDMB sprung up. A King of Abyssinia called “Prester John” was called Emperor of India as recently as the 16th century.
I seem to remember some science show…Cosmos?..where a dramatization between a monk and an Arab scholar was taking place as the Christian West was discovering the ease of manipulating Arab Numerals over Roman Numerals.
Perplexed by this particular “o” shape, he is informed that the symbol represents the value of “none”…you just leave a hole.
Don’t recall it in “Cosmos,” but I think that conversation was dramatized in James Burke’s “The Day the Universe Changed.”
It’s not often you see a new programming joke.
Was that a joke? I thought he/she was serious.:smack:
