The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#2So if 0 wasn't a concept, you couldn't count to 10?
I'm not sure I understand. I thought the significance of 0 was the recognition of an absence of existence. Just because numbers use 0 (270, 50, 20, etc.) wouldn't seem to indicate that it was understood at that significance...
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#3"New numbers" are invented to complete a group for a particular arithmetic operation.
Zero is not necessary the addition operation because all cardinals one and above suffice.
Zero is created for the subtraction operation of a cardinal with itself.
There were empty place holders signs in place-number systems of Babylonia and ancent China that function like our zero numeral. But this placeholder did not enter arithmetic operations. So it is not considered the "modern" zero.
Ditto creating negative numbers for cmpleting the subtraction operation group. Ratios for cardinal division. Real numbers for some ratios that are not cardinals. Infinity for zero divisors. Irrationals for roots of cardinals. Imaginaries for roots of negatives. Infinitesmals in differentiation and integration. And so on ...
At some point in medevial times each of these new numbers were considered the work of the Devil because they did not have concrete existance in the physical world. Later on accountants showed how zero & negative numbers were usefule for business. And physicists showed how these new numbers could predict the physical world.
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#4So if 0 wasn't a concept, you couldn't count to 10? I'm not sure I understand. I thought the significance of 0 was the recognition of an absence of existence. Just because numbers use 0 (270, 50, 20, etc.) wouldn't seem to indicate that it was understood at that significance...
think roman numerals. or hash (tally) marks by five.
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#5So if 0 wasn't a concept, you couldn't count to 10? I'm not sure I understand. I thought the significance of 0 was the recognition of an absence of existence. Just because numbers use 0 (270, 50, 20, etc.) wouldn't seem to indicate that it was understood at that significance...
It is two distinct concepts, both important. The one concept is the use of a positional or "place-value" notation for numbers.
Place-value notation means you use a base set of symbols, and then the position when using multiple digits is a multiplier. Compared to say Roman numerals this have the advantage that you can write arbitrarily large numbers. (The Romans didn't have a symbol for numbers larger than 1000, hence larger numbers became cumbersome to write.) More important though, arithmetic is much simpler using a place-value notion, because you can place numbers vertically and then perform the operation on one row at a time.
Place-value notation requires a symbol for "nothing at this place", the "0". The post is about the oldest known use of "0" in a place-value system. (Which probably means the oldest use of a place-value system per se, since you cannot have a place-value system without "0".)
However, using a place-value notation like decimal notation does not mean that you have to accept zero as a natural number. That is a separate issue.
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#6So if 0 wasn't a concept, you couldn't count to 10? I'm not sure I understand. I thought the significance of 0 was the recognition of an absence of existence. Just because numbers use 0 (270, 50, 20, etc.) wouldn't seem to indicate that it was understood at that significance...
The Babylonians got by using a place-system without zero for a long time. People relied on context to disambiguate.
(It probably helped that with a base-60 system, one was six times less likely to have a zero.)
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#7Very interesting!
Of course, reading "Those who can access JSTOR can find some of the papers mentioned above there" demonstrates once more that, alas, the digital divide still exists.
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#8So if 0 wasn't a concept, you couldn't count to 10? I'm not sure I understand. I thought the significance of 0 was the recognition of an absence of existence. Just because numbers use 0 (270, 50, 20, etc.) wouldn't seem to indicate that it was understood at that significance...
No, the problem is not '0' not being a concept. There are two issues here, which are related but not the same. The conecpt of 'nothingness' is irrelevant to both:
1) Dealing with '0' as an ordinary number.
2) Using a positional number system, which requires a symbol or context for telling '1230' from '1023' and '1203', etc.
One tends to think that solving the first issue leads to the second. Solving the second implies in some way having already solved the first, due to the nature of positional systems.
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#9Read Indian scriptures and you'll find the true meaning of Zero.
Re: The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date
#10So if 0 wasn't a concept, you couldn't count to 10? I'm not sure I understand. I thought the significance of 0 was the recognition of an absence of existence. Just because numbers use 0 (270, 50, 20, etc.) wouldn't seem to indicate that it was understood at that significance...
The Babylonians got by using a place-system without zero for a long time. People relied on context to disambiguate. (It probably helped that with a base-60 system, one was six times less likely to have a zero.)
The disambiguation from context was disambiguation of scale because there was no radix point. They did have a way to indicate a zero-valued position in a number, without that you can't really 'disambiguate' or have a positional number system at all.