Zero

I recently read a post online where someone attributed the "invention" of mathematical 0 (zero) to Islamic Arabs some time around 500 AD. Well, they didn't, and it can be proven, a number of ways.

For starters, the mathematician in me must comment. It was the Babylonians that first conceived of the idea of "zero" as a number somewhere around 1900 BC and introduced a symbol for the number zero somewhere around 250 BC - thus the symbol for "0" used in math predates Muhammad by around 800 years (he was born in 570 AD). And in 130 AD, Ptolemy,was using a symbol for zero (a small circle with a long overbar) within a sexagesimal numeral system otherwise using alphabetic Greek numerals.

Secondly, the number concept of "zero" was independently conceived in India around the same time, and it was the Indians (specifically the Indian scholar Pingala) who around 300 BC was actually counting in a binary system of 0 and 1. Also the Mayans around 36 BC conceived of a "zero" number in their counting system complete with a symbol to represent it, and influenced the Incas and other Mesoamericans in their counting systems as well.

The positional notation without the use of zero (using an empty space in tabular arrangements, or the word kha "emptiness") is known to have been in use in India from the 6th century. The earliest certain use of zero as a decimal positional digit dates to the 5th century mention in the Sanskrit text Lokavibhaga. The symbol for a zero digit was written in the shape of a dot, and consequently called bindu ("dot"). The dot had been used in Greece during earlier ciphered numeral periods.

Note that this all transpired while the Greeks were arguing about the philosophical concept of "nothing can't be something" and had to seek public (i.e. philosopher) opinion about whether or not zero was even a number - not unlike debate in the modern west debating the esoterica of facts while others simply go with the facts, but I digress...

But it is the engineer in me that must point out that the long before Muhammad was even born, and before there was a concise definition of zero and negative numbers, people in the west were doing math, building towers, sitting in concrete stadiums, getting water from concrete aqueducts, using paved roads with long bridge spans, damming rivers, and having multiple means of mechanical power conversion systems while achieving a level of sophistication of city and population management that the nomads of the deserts did not have for centuries.

Of course this also started before Muhammad was even born and was concurrent withs Roman soldiers spreading their engineering skills across Europe and into Africa.


Copyright 2012, Kevin Farley (a.k.a. sixdrift, a.k.a. neuronstatic)