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  • Is it possible to get something from nothing?

  • This is the story of a very important number, but a number wasn't always a number.

  • In fact it was much less than a number until relatively recently.

  • This is the story of Zero

  • and it's a story that takes a tortuous and meandering route

  • through 1,500 years of human history.

  • Today we enjoy zero in all its glory where it takes on two roles:

  • The first is as a placeholder within our positional number system.

  • Zero notes an absence of a value

  • and it allows us to create huge numbers

  • without the need to create new digits

  • So we know 30 is larger than 3

  • and 300 is larger than 30 and 3.

  • The second use of zero is as a number in its own right,

  • the middleman between positive and negative one

  • and enjoying nearly all the same benefits as other numbers.

  • We can subtract, add and multiply by zero...

  • but dividing by zero just doesn't work.

  • For example, you can't divide 1 chicken by no chickens.

  • You might suggest that the answer is infinity, but it's not,

  • because infinity isn't a number, it's a concept.

  • Mathematics developed from a very practical desire to count things,

  • such as the passage of days

  • or the quantities of chickens you owned.

  • To manage this, ancient civilisations developed rudimentary number systems,

  • for example the Babylonians used two symbols in different arrangements

  • to create unique numbers 1-60.

  • The Ancient Greeks and the Mayans also developed their own number systems

  • and all of these civilisations are thought to have created

  • their own rough concepts of zero as a placeholder.

  • But it wasn't until the Indians begun developing their own number system

  • that zero would be defined explicitly.

  • Their early number system would also evolve into the one we use today,

  • initially with 9 number symbols and then a small dot used to mark the absence of a number.

  • In the 7th Century mathematician Brahmagupta developed terms for zero in

  • addition, subtraction and division, although he struggled with the latter,

  • as would academics for hundreds of years to come.

  • As the mathematics of India matured it found its way Eastwards to China and Westwards,

  • influencing the Islamic and Arabic cultures where it was instrumental in trade.

  • But Zero found resistance in Europe

  • as the Hindu-Arabic system was opposed by the

  • Roman Empire's established numeral system.

  • However, by the 13th Century academics such as Italian mathematician Fibonacci

  • were championing the new number system in their work,

  • helping zero gain a solid foothold across Europe.

  • Over the next 400 years as mathematics evolved from practical applications

  • to ever more abstracted functions, zero would form the cornerstone of calculus.

  • Calculus allowed anyone to break dynamic systems down

  • into smaller and smaller units approaching zero,

  • but cunningly avoided the trap of having to divide by zero.

  • Zero had now became a celebrated tool in the mathematical arsenal

  • and as the binary numerical system formed the foundation for modern computer programming,

  • zero once again stepped into the limelight to prove its worth.

  • And so it seems after all this time, it was finally possible to get something from nothing.

Is it possible to get something from nothing?

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