Inventing Nothing

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Inventing Nothing

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The idea of "nothing" as a number seems obvious today, but it took millennia to develop. While the Babylonians and Maya used zero as a placeholder, it was Indian mathematician Brahmagupta who first treated zero as a number in its own right around 628 CE, defining rules for arithmetic with zero. The concept traveled to the Islamic world via al-Khwarizmi and eventually to Europe through Fibonacci in the 13th century. Without zero, there would be no binary code, no computers, no modern mathematics. The symbol "0" we use today evolved from a dot used in Indian manuscripts.

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