Numbers and counting have become an integral part of our everyday life, especially when we take into account the modern computer.These words you are reading have been recorded on a computer using a code of ones and zeros. It is an interesting story how these digits have come to dominate our world.
Numbers Around the World
Stick Counting MarksPresently, the earliest known archaeological evidence of any form of writing or counting are scratch marks on a bone from 150,000 years ago. But the first really solid evidence of counting,in the form of the number one, is from a mere twenty-thousand years ago. An ishango bone was found in the Congo with two identical markings of sixty scratches each and equally numbered groups on the back.These markings are a certain indication of counting and they mark a defining moment in western civilization.
Zero becomes a real number
The concept of zero as a number and not merely a symbol for separation is attributed to India where by the 9th century CE practical calculations were carried out using zero, which was treated like any other number, even in the case of division.
The story of zero is actually a story of two zeroes: zero as a symbol to represent nothing and zero as a number that can be used in calculations and has its own mathematical properties.
It has been commented that in India, the concept of nothing is important in its early religion and philosophy and so it was much more natural to have a symbol for it than for the Latin (Roman) and Greek systems. The rules for the use of zero were written down first by Brahmagupta, in his book “Brahmasphutha Siddhanta” (The Opening of the Universe) in the year 628 CE. Here Brahmagupta considers not only zero, but negative numbers, and the algebraic rules for the elementary operations of arithmetic with such numbers.
“The importance of the creation of the zero mark can never be exaggerated.This giving to airy nothing, not merely a local habitation and a name, a picture, a symbol, but helpful power, is the characteristic of the Hindu race from whence it sprang. It is like coining the Nirvana into dynamos. No single mathematical creation has been more potent for the general on-go of intelligence and power.” - G. B. Halsted 5
A very important distinction for the Indian symbol for zero, is that, unlike the Babylonian and Mayan zero, the Indian zero symbol came to be understood as meaning nothing.
As the Indian decimal zero and its new mathematics spread from the Arab world to Europe in the Middle Ages, words derived from sifr and zephyrus came to refer to calculation, as well as to privileged knowledge and secret codes. Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number.They asked themselves,“How can nothing be something?” This lead to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum.
The word “zero” came via the French word zéro, and cipher came from the Arabic word safira which means “it was empty.” Also sifr, meaning “zero” or “nothing,” was the translation for the Sanskrit word sunya, which means void or empty.
The number zero was especially regarded with suspicion in Europe, so much so that the word cipher for zero became a word for secret code in modern usage. It is very likely a linguistic memory of the time when using decimal arithmetic was deemed evidence of dabbling in the occult, which was potentially punishable by the all-powerful Catholic Church with death.