Zero as a concept (placeholder) emerged in several ancient cultures like the Babylonians and Mayans, but the invention of zero as a number with its own rules is credited to ancient India, specifically by mathematician Brahmagupta around 628 CE, building on earlier work by Aryabhata. This concept of zero as a number traveled from India to the Arab world and then to Europe, becoming foundational to modern mathematics.
India: The Birthplace of Zero as a Number
Around the 5th century CE, the Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata used a symbol for zero in his astronomical calculations. However, it was Brahmagupta, another Indian mathematician, who formalized the use of zero in 628 CE.
This philosophical understanding of 'emptiness' or 'void' laid the groundwork for the mathematical adoption of the number zero. By the 6th century AD, prominent Indian mathematicians like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta had begun employing zero as a placeholder in their calculations.
The modern use of 0 in this manner derives from Indian mathematics that was transmitted to Europe via medieval Islamic mathematicians and popularized by Fibonacci. It was independently used by the Maya. Common names for the number 0 in English include zero, nought, naught (/nɔːt/), and nil.
In math, zero is defined — it's a concrete thing. But when we start thinking about zero in philosophical terms, it becomes a representation of the unknown, the void, the absence that still somehow exists. It's both there and not there, a place-holder for non-existence.
Zero was once considered mysterious and even dangerous in medieval Europe — it was banned in some places because it represented “nothingness.” In Roman numerals, there is no zero — which is why their calculations were limited.
"Naught" and "nought" come from the Old English "nāwiht" and "nōwiht", respectively, both of which mean "nothing". They are compounds of no- ("no") and wiht ("thing").
It's one syllable shorter, and it sounds a bit better to my ears (native American English speaker). Nine-zero-four has that relatively rare “z” sound in there which sounds out of place, especially when compared to nine-oh-four. And the digit does look like the letter.
While the answer to who discovered zero is usually Brahmagupta, Aryabhatta deserves a special mention. He used a dot to represent zero as a placeholder in his famous work, the Aryabhatiya. This was a crucial step that made it easier for later mathematicians to treat zero as a number, not just a blank space.
Al-Khwarizmi's work on arithmetic was responsible for introducing the Arabic numerals, based on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system developed in Indian mathematics, to the Western world.
The most popular mispronunciation concerned the word “gyro“; the report found that roughly 312,000 people across the U.S. needed a refresher on the pronunciation — YEE-roh — during the study period.
We also understand that "two point oh" is the way that Tim O'Reilly, credited with coining the term, says it.
In mathematics, the symbol ∅ represents the empty set, which is a set containing no elements at all. It is also commonly referred to as the null set and is a fundamental concept in set theory as it serves as the unique set with zero members.
As far as mathematics is concerned, zero isn't defined as "nothing". Zero is an additive identity element in some set, where addition is a defined operation on. We denote the identity element with the symbol 0, if there is only one such element.
Since then, zero has, at times, been met with some fear — at one point the city of Florence, Italy banned the number. Today, scientists seek to understand how much humans truly comprehend zero — and why it seems to be different from other numbers.
Early seeds: Placeholder concepts before zero
Around the 3rd century BCE, they began using a placeholder symbol, initially two angled wedges, to denote the absence of a value within a number, but not at the end.
Using this algorithm with hand computations on paper, Lucas showed in 1876 that the 39-digit number (2127 – 1) equals 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727, and that value is prime. Also known as M127, this number remains the largest prime verified by hand computations.
A vigintillion is a massive number, most commonly defined in the short scale as 1 followed by 63 zeros (106310 to the 63rd power1063), making it one thousand novemdecillion, though historically and in the long scale (used in some European countries), it could mean 1 followed by 120 zeros (1012010 to the 120th power10120). The modern standard in English-speaking countries uses the short scale, where a vigintillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0001 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 000 comma 0001,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
a cardinal number represented in the U.S. by 1 followed by 51 zeros, and in Great Britain by 1 followed by 96 zeros.