by Tamaal Ghosh

Created on: March 06, 2009

A Big, Fat Zero.

The prodigious power of nothing.

A paradox that probably doesn't really occur to people until someone with the warped, twisted mind of, say, ex-Monty Pythoner Terry Jones points it out.

Interviewed by the B.B.C. for his 2005 programme, "The Power of One" he said Europeans started using the zero in medieval times:

""The numerals we use are from India. We think they are Arabic but they aren't, The Arabs got it from the Indians and we got it from the Arabs. But don't ask me when that was...I'm hopeless with dates. I'd never make an academic."

Historians believe the concept was proposed by Indian astronomer Brahmagupta. His treatise was then translated into Arabic and forwarded in about 620AD.

The Romans, whose system was in use in much of Europe until the late Middle Ages, had no proper concept of nothing as a number.

"Roman numerals may have held the Romans back. Their system was so cumbersome and they never produced any mathematicians, unlike the Greeks."

Their famous and long-lived numerals didn't cover zero. Instead, they just gave it a name: "nulla", or nothing. Other culture used other methods to indicate the absence a value - not one looked upon it as a bona fide number in itself. The Babylonians credited with the earliest system of writing in the west and with place-value system like that of modern times for over a millennium, simply used two wedges instead of our zero.

Even this took centuries to develop. Prior to about 400 B.C, they relied on the context of the number to tell them if 216 was intended or 2106. As
J J O'Connor and E F Robertson point out in A history of Zero:
"If this reference to context appears silly then it is worth noting that we still use context to interpret numbers today. If I take a bus to a nearby town and ask what the fare is then I know that the answer "It's three fifty" means three pounds fifty pence. Yet if the same answer is given to the question about the cost of a flight from Edinburgh to New York then I know that three hundred and fifty pounds is what is intended."

Here, the zero is clearly a punctuation mark verbally ensuring the numbers had the correct interpretation.

The seemingly-simple and basic ten-digit set of numerals, from which any other number could be synthesised, was like all evolutions,one which spanned an astonishing quantity land and milennia.

But, just thinking about the difficulties created by this 'unnumber' - which is what zero is, a symbol for something that isn't in existence - it's pretty easy

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