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© Copyright 2000, Jim Loy
A friend of mine imagines (or pretends to imagine) that in ancient times zero was some kind of well-guarded secret. Some countries had this secret, and reaped the obvious benefits, and others did not.
"When you travel, don't tell anyone about zero."
"He found out about zero; we will have to kill him."
"Sir, there are rumors of a number less than I."
"Preposterous. You enlisted men will believe anything."
Eventually, word got out, as with most secrets, and zero was no longer a secret. And we now use zero. This is a humorous, but slightly skewed, story.
The number systems of ancient cultures (See Egyptian Numbers and Roman Numerals Defined) normally did not have a symbol for zero. They got along fine. Their cultures had a concept like zero (none, empty, no money, etc.). But this concept was not even considered a number, just as 1/2 is not a whole number, or infinity is not a number today. But, without a zero digit, they had two problems. Their arithmetic was cumbersome, and they had difficulties representing very large numbers.
Positional notation was invented in Babylonia. It was re-invented in India. I will use modern numbers in this article. In this notation, we count this ************************ as 24 asterisks. The 2 (in 24) does not represent 2 at all, but 20 because of its position in the number. The four does indeed represent a 4, because of its position. In a number like 324, the 3 represents 300, and so on. In describing this, I have used zeros. Zero is a place holder. The zero in 4017 means zero 100's. So 4017 means 4x1000+0x100+1x10+7x1. Arithmetic becomes somewhat easier, and very large numbers are easy to represent. This notation is often called Arabic numbers (or numerals), because it was introduced to Europe by the Moslems. But it is more correctly called Hindu-Arabic numbers (or numerals).
And it wasn't a secret. It was just unknown to Europeans. And, had they known about it, they may not have seen the advantages, just as many Americans do not see the advantages of the metric system. I wonder how many centuries it took for Europe to convert to Hindu-Arabic numbers. Ah, it took them five centuries (from about 1200 when Fibonacci introduced Hindu-Arabic numbers to Europe, to about 1700 when they became popular), as pointed out by a reader named Tim.
See Hindu Arabic Numeric Medieval Ideograms.