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For me the importance of zero is not about assigning a symbol to nothing. It’s about to come up with the idea that the symbol for the number of things one more

For me the importance of zero is not about assigning a symbol to nothing. It’s about to come up with the idea that the symbol for the number of things one more than 9 should be 10 instead of another arbitrary symbol. This concept seems intuitive at first, but when you think about it, it’s such an genius idea.

dataflow 4y ago
> For me the importance of zero is not about assigning a symbol to nothing. It’s about to come up with the idea that the symbol for the number of things one more than 9 should be 10 instead of another arbitrary symbol. By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value (or zero) was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. [...] The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not used alone, nor was it used at the end of a number. Thus numbers like 2 and 120 (2×60), 3 and 180 (3×60), 4 and 240 (4×60) looked the same, because the larger numbers lacked a final sexagesimal placeholder. Only context could differentiate them. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0