For the past couple of months, I have been developing the first product at my company, Unusual. Internally, the code name for the product is Project- Zero. While working on the product, I was intrigued by how the number zero came to be and how it has become a part of modern arithmetic. This curiosity led me to read more deeply about the origins of the number.
Zero as we know it is now a part of everything from the digital world to modern physics, economics, sports scores and our overall understanding of the world.Zero as a concept travelled across the world before cementing its place in modern arithmetic. Once, I started reading more about it, its historical origin story took me on a journey across the world.
A Placeholder in the Ancient World
Zero existed as a concept. in the ancient world. There is historical evidence of it being used in the inscriptions and symbolic texts of the Babylonian and the Mayan civilizations. The people of these civilizations used a symbol just as a placeholder. The Babylonian cuneiform numerics did not carry the abstract concept of zero and it served more as a positional notation. They never had a symbol for zero but had one for the absence of numbers.
India: Where the true metamorphosis of ZERO as we understand it has happened.
A unique blend of spiritual and intellectual thinking in the mainstream is what made this a possibility. It took centuries before Zero was actually accepted as a proper number.
According to maths author Alex Bellos, India was the perfect setting: “The idea of nothing being something was already deep in their culture. If you think about ‘nirvana’ it’s the state of nothingness – all your worries and desires go. So why not have a symbol for nothing?”The concept of nothingness and emptiness was known to India. This concept was called Shunyata. Shunya is the name given to both nothingness and the number zero in Sanskrit.
Around the 5th century, Aryabhatta, the Indian mathematician and astronomer, contributed multiple concepts to the field of mathematics, by using the concept of zero in his calculations.
In the 7th century another man named Brahmagupta, developed the use of Zero within calculations, treating it as a separate number by itself for the first time. This brought us to the decimal system we use in modern mathematics. In the city of Gwalior in India,
there is a temple where zeros are inscribed on the walls. These are some
of the oldest recorded zeros in history.
Arab world
Once the superior aspects of the decimal system with Nine digits and Zero started propagating, it gained a foothold in South Asia, and from there crossed into the Middle East, where it was championed by Islamic scholars and added to the number systems. The origin of presently used English word Zero comes from the arab word Sifr.
Europe
After its beginning in the East, the idea travelled to Europe. There were times around 1299, when zero was banned in Florence, along with all Arabic numerals, because people felt it encouraged fraud as the addition of them to the other digits would easily inflate prices on the receipts. In 1200 AD, Italian mathematician Fibonacci, a man who has been considered the ‘most talented western mathematician of the Middle Ages’ wrote of Indian Mathematics and their use of zero. There are quite a few fascinating stories in the history of mathematics about how new ideas were adopted across the world.
Zero Now
The concept of zero went on to revolutionise the development of mathematics and is foundational to algebra and algorithms. Calculus was developed by Isaac Newton in Cambridge and has become the foundation for the development of modern science and technology. Even as I type each of these words, on my computer, the digital computations all happen to touch base with the concept of zero. The modern digital revolution and computing are built on bits of Zero and One.
The basis of your whole world rests on the concept of nothingness and how we perceive nothingness. Metaphorically it makes me connect with a saying we here, it is the silence between the beats that makes up the music, similarly, it is nothingness or the concept of zero that helps us make sense of everything around us and create our reality.
And oh! I forgot to mention our first product at Unusual, code-named Project Zero is now called Shuunya.