Something About Nothing

                            

   Rather than a number’’ Zero” has an interesting past . The word for Zero in India , the name by which it was coined, was Shunya (शून्य), meaning 'void'. This word travelled, along with the Indian numeral system, into Arabia during the Medieval period of the Baghdad Caliphate. Then who invented zero? Zero was invented independently by the Babylonians, Mayans and Indians (although some researchers say the Indian number system was influenced by the Babylonians). The Babylonians got their number system from the Sumerians, the first people in the world to develop a counting system. Two Indian mathematicians are credited with developing it. Aryabhata of Kusumapura developed the place-value notation in the 5th century and a century later Brahmagupta introduced the symbol for zero.

                       Pingala (c. 3rd/2nd century BC), a Sanskrit prosody scholar, used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables), a notation similar to Morse code. Pingala used the Sanskrit word śūnya explicitly to refer to zero.It was considered that the earliest text to use a decimal place-value system, including a zero, is the Lokavibhāga, a Jain text on cosmology surviving in a medieval Sanskrit translation of the Prakrit original, which is internally dated to AD 458 (Saka era 380). In this text, śūnya ("void, empty") is also used to refer to zero.A symbol for zero, a large dot likely to be the precursor of the still-current hollow symbol, is used throughout the Bakhshali manuscript, a practical manual on arithmetic for merchants. In 2017 three samples from the manuscript were shown by radiocarbon dating to come from three different centuries: from 224-383 AD, 680-779 AD, and 885-993 AD, making it the world's oldest recorded use of the zero symbol. It is not known how the birch bark fragments from different centuries that form the manuscript came to be packaged together.The origin of the modern decimal-based place value notation can be traced to the Aryabhatiya (c. 500), which states sthānāt sthānaṁ daśaguṇaṁ syāt "from place to place each is ten times the preceding." The concept of zero as a digit in the decimal place value notation was developed in India, presumably as early as during the Gupta period(c. 5th century), with the oldest unambiguous evidence dating to the 7th century.The rules governing the use of zero appeared for the first time in Brahmagupta’'s Brahmasputha Siddhanta(7th century). This work considers not only zero, but negative numbers, and the algebraic rules for the elementary operations of arithmetic with such numbers. In some instances, his rules differ from the modern standard, specifically the definition of the value of zero divided by zero as zero.

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Sources: Wikipedia