The article, and the overall discussion is really about having a symbol in your numeric alphabet for "none," not about having a conception of nothing. Even mo

The article, and the overall discussion is really about having a symbol in your numeric alphabet for "none," not about having a conception of nothing. Even more particularly, it's about the use of that symbol in a positional symbolic system for representing natural numbers. That is the breakthrough generally accredited to India, not the idea that before you have 1 thing, you have no (zero) things.