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January
29, 2003:
Facts About Zero
Interview
with Robert Kaplan, author of The
Nothing That Is
Mike
Carruthers:
The number zero has a fascinating history.
Robert
Kaplan:
It comes from the Sumerians, who invented it 5000 years ago.
Mathematician
Robert Kaplan, author of the book The
Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero.
And it
has just the most incredible history. It goes underground for
a very long time. It reemerges in India in the 5th and 6th centuries
A.D. I think people have always been afraid of 'nothing' because
that's the devil's work, as people said in the west when Arabs
brought zero to the west in the 9th and 10th centuries. Arabs
picked it up from the Indians, brought it to the west, and one
Englishman, William of ???, said "This is dangerous, sera
sin magic. You don't want to talk about nothing. It might make
the devil appear."
But zero
does so much more than represent nothing in our number system,
says Robert.
If you
wanted to keep track of anything with a number system, instead
of inventing a new name or a new symbol for every number, when
you get to nine, you take one of your old symbols-one-and put
the symbol 'zero' next to it. That makes ten. The next number
along…and then one-zero-zero 100, one-zero-zero-zero for 1000
and so on. It's that way of pushing numbers over to the left
which gives us our positional way of making numbers, and that
alone allows us to do mathematics. The Romans didn't have that.
For them, adding, multiplying, and subtracting was very, very
difficult.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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