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> in fact many societies / civilizations never even understood or used zero in arithmetic Yeah, but those societies were uniformly terrible at math.
by technomancy 15y ago
> in fact many societies / civilizations never even understood or used zero in arithmetic
Yeah, but those societies were uniformly terrible at math.
- gaius 15y agoThere are Roman bridges still standing, and Roman roads still in use.
- fractallyte 15y agoTherefore, with the concept of 'zero' in mind, I'm going to revisit the parent statement: If I hold up my fingers to indicate elements in an array, zero fingers means the array is empty. One finger is then, naturally, the first item: of index 1. Counting elements starting at zero (for the first element) is still unnatural...
- joe_the_user 15y agoNo, there really are no any societies that "terrible" at math, only societies that have evolved more sophisticated math than others - the smartest member of given society will certainly use the concepts the society has evolved correctly. And you only need 1...N to order N bins and their contents.