inbetween

[As promised to Caroline]

Zero (0) the number means nothing, emptyness. Zero the numeral (106) is a symbol used as a placeholder in writing. The two concepts are related but different. Zero means, literally, nothing. It expresses the lack of any quanty or amount of something.

As a number, zero is the only number which is neither positive nor odd. It preceeds one and succeeds minus one. Zero is neither even nor odd.

The word "zero" comes to English from Arabic, through the Greeks, and Latinate Europeans of the Late Dark Ages.

The first arithmetic system was developed by the Babylonians, called cuneiform (ca. 2000 BC). Cuneiform is a base sixty writing system. At first, the Babylonians would leave a small space between two cuneiform digits in the same way that we would use 0 as a placeholder. This resulted in a very ambiguous writing system, as there was already a space between the digits. According to Wikipedia the Babylonians began using a particular glyph as a zero numerial at around 300 BC. Howard Eves' A History of Mathematics places this transition at around 400 BC. It is interesting to note that the Babylonians did not use their zero symbol alone as a number. There is no written record of "zero apples" in cuneiform.

There is no zero symbol in the first Greek or Roman numerial systems. Even the Ancient Egyptians (who had sophisticated fractions with the Eye of Horus) lacked a symbol for zero. The Greeks questioned wether zero (the number) was a number at all!

The first western use of zero as a number was by Ptolemy the Great (ca. 130 AD). The Romans (ca. 525) would later use "nulla" to mean nothing, the number zero.

During the European Dark Ages, the rest of the world made significant progress in arithmetic. Indian, Hindu, Chinese and Islam mathematicians all began to use the number zero.

Leonardo Fibonacci (ca. 1200) spent parts of his youth in North Africa, where he learned of the Hindu-Arabic numerial system, including the zero numeral. In his work Liber Abaci he showed European mathematicians and businessmen that "with the nine figures of the Indians ... and with the sign 0 which in Arabic is called zephirum, any number can be written."

The first printed, as opposed to scribe-copied, arithemtic appeared in 1478 in the anonymous Treviso Arithmetic. The first known person use of "+" and "-" to denote addition and subtraction was Johann Widmann, ca. 1489. Robert Recorde's The Whetstone of Witte (ca. 1557) was the first usage of a symbol for equality, two horizontal lines close together.

Brahmagupta (598-668) established the arithmetic rules now used for zero in the Brahmasphutasiddhanta (tr. The Opening of the Universe).