- May 24, 2008
- 7,988
- 14,745
haha indeed, that's what I was going for! I seem to remember that the number zero was discovered independently by both the mayans and certain asian cultures (but I found out about the asians bit just a few years ago, since here in my country we're only taught about the mayans doing it, given that they are part of our history and culture).
These early counting systems only saw the zero as a placeholder—not a number with its own unique value or properties. A full grasp of zero’s importance would not arrive until the seventh century A.D. in India. There, the mathematician Brahmagupta and others used small dots under numbers to show a zero placeholder, but they also viewed the zero as having a null value, called “sunya.” Brahmagupta was also the first to show that subtracting a number from itself results in zero. From India, the zero made its way to China and back to the Middle East, where it was taken up by the mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi around 773. It was al-Khowarizmi who first synthesized Indian arithmetic and showed how the zero could function in algebraic equations, and by the ninth century the zero had entered the Arabic numeral system in a form resembling the oval shape we use today.