"0". What is it? You will answer "It is a zero". What can it do? Well, it can do noting when it is alone. When combined with other numbers ? It can do miracles. Did you ever think of life without zero? No, You didn't. Cause our civilization, our technology, our commerce, economy, science, mathematics even our daily life is greatly depend on it. What if we delete zero from our life ? Our whole modern civilization will collapse.
As per sources zero was first invented in Ancient Sumeria. From there it spreaded to Babylon, India, China etc. We find the first appearance of zero in India around 2nd or 3rd century BC. It was called "Sunya", which means empty space.
How zero boosted up our advancement ? Let's think of a number. Let's take 100. You wrote it easily. Now if you write it in Roman numeral, then it will be "C". Now you multiply this 100 with 235. Answer is 23500. Now do that in Roman. It will be C multiply by..... let me think. What is 235 in Roman numeral? Need to google. Got it. It is CCXXXV. Then what is 23500? Need to google it again. It is (X)(X)MMMD. Nowadays you have google. Think of our scientists or mathematicians of ancient time. To do this simple multiplication, which our 2nd grade children can do in minutes, would take at least 2 minutes (If you know Roman numeral very well, if not then sadly...... you can't). It is only 23500, What if it is 1035673589. It would take a whole day to just find and write this number. Zero made it easy, "A matter of minute".
Zero made it possible for mathematics, one of the main pillars of our science to do the calculations fast. That made our civilization to develop in rapid speed.
So, conclusion is : Zero is invaluable and one of the greatest invention of human civilization. It is the greatest number of all time.
The way I look at it, if numbers and math are one of ways for human to figure out reality, and zero is representation of nothing-emptiness-void, maybe with the help of nothing we will figure out some hard stuff, like anti-matter, dark energy,etc.
ReplyDelete0 is what makes 1 whole :)
Nice 😊
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