All about the number zero in Mathematics

Among the whole numbers that have been problematic in the history of mathematics is the number zero .

Today, it makes sense to consider negative integers, especially when forecasting winter temperatures. These are the relative integers.

However, the history of zero is long and had many obstacles according to cultures and times. The number zero exists as we know it only since the 13th century!

And the mathematicians of ancient Greece? For ancient science, the Pythagoreans and other famous Greek mathematicians (Thales, Euclid , Archimedes, etc.), what exists is one and what does not exist cannot be described. The Greeks of the 5th, 4th and 3rd centuries BC, therefore, did not have any writing to represent emptiness, nullity, and nothingness in their numbering system .

The zero knows its first existence in the time of the Babylonians, where it serves to materialize the void between the numbers, finding a position function between the numbers. Thus, they wrote symbols between 7 and 5 to write the number 705, for example.

Did you know…? Brahmagupta, a Hindu mathematician, publishes in 628 the Brahma  Sphuta Siddhanta , a treatise on astronomy that defines zero as a subtraction of a number by itself (x – x = 0).

After several inheritances, the zero crosses the borders of the empires and theories arise to try to prove the existence of this number.

For example, they try to subtract, add, multiply, and divide numbers by 0.

Hindu scholars discovered, since it is mathematically impossible to divide a number with 0 as the denominator, that the more a number is divided by a number close to 0 (only slightly larger than 0), the further it moves away from it exponentially. Thus they explored decimal numbers, admitting that the interval from 0 to 1 is subdivided into infinity of decimal places.

Thus they discovered that zero is linked to an infinity of values, with 1 / x = infinity.

The 0 broke into obscurantist Christian Europe in the 12th century, after Arab scholars used the cipher ( sifr  in Arabic) and it became more and more calculable, thanks to the Italian L. Fibonacci, who publishes  Liber abaci , a Arithmetic book that refers to the mathematical knowledge of the time, including that of the Arab-Muslim world.

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Zero, the symbol of emptiness, of the absence of quantity and nothingness, has many cultural, popular and philosophical representations.

Here are several symbols of this number:

• The absence of value, the gratuitous;
• Integrity (100%);
• The origin of everything;
• The limits to reach;
• The unit and eternity;
• Renovation (hence the expression “start from scratch”);
• Safety;
• The egg: fertility, femininity, the fetus;
• The cycle, etc.

Both negative and positive, zero is neutral and is the only integer that  returns the result to zero when multiplied by any other value. All about the number zero in Mathematics