> Zero is important because it is the first abstraction I’m not sure what this even means, but Sumerians had abstract mathematics, in addition to art and liter

> Zero is important because it is the first abstraction I’m not sure what this even means, but Sumerians had abstract mathematics, in addition to art and literature which are abstract by their nature. They were using numbers in the abstract sense before the number zero was named, and so while it seems like a logical and tempting narrative that naming zero is what abstracted numbers, history doesn’t seem to support this particular post-facto rationalization. Naming zero is very important in the history of math, it just isn’t the first abstraction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer#Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer#Mathematics