A Brief and Early History of Zero (ca. 2nd C BC – onward)
Though undoubtedly taken for granted today, the number (or lack thereof) known as “zero” was not always a part of the human mathematical mindset. Since zero is more of a concept than an actual number, the development of ‘true zero’ took quite some time to enter into human consciousness.
By the 2nd century BC, the ancient Babylonians had developed their own highly sophisticated mathematical theories – however, the way they expressed the lack of a positional value (ie. nothing, zero) was by leaving a space between numerals. By 300 BC, instead of leaving a space, two slanted wedges were used as ‘zero’ punctuation, while a tablet from the city of Kish shows that at least one scribe – in this case, a man named Bel-ban-aplu – wrote his zeros by making three hook marks instead of the slanted wedges.
And yet even at this early stage, the Babylonian nothingness-placeholder was not a real zero in the ‘true’ sense of the word, since it was neither used alone, nor was it ever placed at the end of a number. For example, in the Babylonian sexagesimal system of numerals, both the numbers for 2 and 120 (since it would be 2 x 60) looked the same, and could only be differentiated through context.
Elsewhere in the world, the ancient Greeks had their own notions of what constituted zero: they were unsure of its status as a number, since they didn’t see how nothing could be counted as something… naturally for the Greeks, this vein of thinking led toward philosophical and religious arguments about the nature of zero and whether ‘nothing’ could ever be thought of as ‘existing’. As a result, the thought of zero and nothingness was an immensely terrifying concept to Greek philosophers!
Somewhere around the 5th to 2nd centuries BC, an Indian scholar named Pingala made use of the Sanskrit word “sunya” to refer to nothing or a void, which is actually the word that finally became the word “zero” after a series of translations over time. During the 4th century in India, scholars would often use a blank piece on a counting board to physically represent zero.
Separately from these other developments, the Mayans came up with their own system of representing zero – and although it became an integral part of the Mayan mathematical system, their isolation from other cultural groups did not result in any influence on Old World numeral systems.
The first documented use of zero as a number on its own came from ca. 130 BC, when the Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy began writing a small ‘o’ with a long bar overtop as a symbol for nothing. However, this form of ‘zero’ still was not used for anything but fractions. It was not until sometime between the 6th and 8th century that a symbol for zero which could be used for representing an integral part of a number appeared on copper and stone tablets in India.
Although the history of ‘zero’ as a numerical concept is much lengthier than the small portion discussed above, it is worth noting that in 628 AD, the Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta wrote his definitive work Brahmasphuta-siddhanta (translated “The Opening of the Universe”), which attempted to definite the mathematical role of zero, thus ending the debate once and for all. Of course, the nature of zero was discussed and changed long afterward, but this work sparked a new direction and is still considered a piece of highly sophisticated mathematical theory for its time.
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