The Invention of Zero

Today, zero seems like the simplest number of all, but for most of human history, people did not have it.

The ancient Egyptians built huge pyramids, and the Romans built roads across Europe, yet neither of them had a symbol for nothing.

So how did zero appear, and why was it such an important idea?

About 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians in Mesopotamia wrote numbers by pressing small marks into clay.

Their system had a serious problem, because the number 60 was written with the same mark as the number 1.

Later, they started to use a special sign to show an empty place in a number, but they still did not think of zero as a number itself.

The big step came in India.

In the year 628, a mathematician called Brahmagupta wrote rules for zero, which explained what happens when you add it to a number or take it away.

For the first time, zero was treated as a real number, not just as an empty space.

Indian mathematicians used a small dot or a circle for it, and this circle slowly became the 0 that we use today.

From India, the idea traveled to Baghdad, where scholars translated Indian books into Arabic.

The Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi wrote about the new numbers in the ninth century, and his work later reached Europe.

In 1202, an Italian called Fibonacci explained these numbers in a famous book, and merchants soon saw how much easier they made their calculations.

Interestingly, the Arabic word for zero, sifr, which means "empty," gave English the word "zero" and gave Turkish the word "sıfır."

Without zero, there would be no modern mathematics, no computers and no smartphones, because computers store everything as long lines of zeros and ones.

That is not bad for a number that means nothing.