It seems almost a bizarre question. Who thinks about whether zero was invented or discovered? And why is it important?
Answering this question, however, can tell you a lot about yourself and how you see the world.
Let’s break it down.
“Invented” implies that humans created the zero and that without us, the zero and its properties would cease to exist.
“Discovered” means that although the symbol is a human creation, what it represents would exist independently of any human ability to label it.
So do you think of the zero as a purely mathematical function, and by extension think of all math as a human construct like, say, cheese or self-driving cars? Or is math, and the zero, a symbolic language that describes the world, the content of which exists completely independently of our descriptions?
The zero is now a ubiquitous component of our understanding.
The concept is so basic it is routinely mastered by the pre-kindergarten set. Consider the equation 3-3=0. Nothing complicated about that. It is second nature to us that we can represent “nothing” with a symbol. It makes perfect sense now, in 2017, and it’s so common that we forget that zero was a relatively late addition to the number scale.
Here’s a fact that’s amazing to most people: the zero is actually younger than mathematics. Pythagoras’s famous conclusion — that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides — was achieved without a zero. As was Euclid’s entire Elements.
How could this be? It seems surreal, given the importance the zero now has to mathematics, computing, language, and life.
How could someone figure out the complex geometry of triangles, yet not realize that nothing was also a number?Tobias Dantzig, in Number: The Language of Science, offers this as a possible explanation: “The concrete mind of the ancient Greeks could not conceive the void as a number, let alone endow the void with a symbol.” This gives us a good direction for finding the answer to the original question because it hints that you must first understand the concept of the void before you can name it. You need to see that nothingness still takes up space.
It was thought, and sometimes still is, that the number zero was invented in the pursuit of ancient commerce. Something was needed as a placeholder; otherwise, 65 would be indistinguishable from 605 or 6050. The zero represents “no units” of the particular place that it holds. So for that last number, we have six thousands, no hundreds, five tens, and no singles.
A happy accident of no great original insight, zero then made its way around the world. In addition to being convenient for keeping track of how many bags of grain you were owed, or how many soldiers were in your army, it turned our number scale into an extremely efficient decimal system. More so than any numbering…
The post Zero — Invented or Discovered? appeared first on FeedBox.