Alg. Newsletter Project.

This is a small portion of my alg newsletter project. Telling about the history of the number "0".

During the mid 2nd millennium BC, the Babylonians had a sophisticated positional numeral system. If there was a place value that needed a replacement, the Babylonians used a space as the replacement.

By 300 BC, a punctuation symbol, made up of 2 slanted wedges, was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In an old tablet, dating back from 700 BC, the scribe Bel-ban-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges.

The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not uses alone. Nor was it used at the end of a number. Making numbers like 2 and 120 (2x60), 3 and 180 (3x60), 4 and 240 (4x60); all looked the same because the larger numbers lacked a final placeholder.

Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed to be unsure about the statues of zero as a number. They wondered how could nothing, be something. Leading to a philosophical and, but the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero occurred.

The first early use of zero as a number was by an Indian scholar Pingala. It was in use for his binary numbers. Him, and many other Indian scholars called started using zero, but called it other names.

Years later, zero was being used by many Greeks, Indians and other human civilization.

People currently use zero across the world. Representing an amount of nothing. Also representing zero as a numeral.