Zero, one of man’s greatest inventions, was a concept that has had a tremendous influence on the history of mankind because it made the development of higher mathematics possible.
Until about the sixteenth century, the number system used in Europe was the Roman system, invented about two thousand years ago. The Roman system was built on a base of 10. Thus the mark ‘X’ means 10. The letter ‘C’
means 100. The letter ‘M’ stands for 1,000. The mark for 1 is T, for 5 ‘V’, and for 50 ‘L’, and for ‘500’, D. 4 is shown by TV’, or 1 less than 5. To indicate 1,648, you write—’MDCXL VIII’. In the Roman system, to read the number, sometimes you count, some times you subtract, sometimes you add.
Long before the birth of Christ, the Hindus in India had invented a far better number system. It was bought to Europe about the year 900 by Arab traders and is called the Hindu-Arabic system. In this system, all numbers are written with the nine digits—1,2, 3,4,5, 6, 7, 8,9—and the 193 Great Inventions and Discoveries-13 Zero, 0. In a number written with this system each figure has value according to the place in which it is written. The number 40 means four 10’s and no units, or 40 units. The Zero shows that the 4 is written in the 10’s place.
With the invention of the Zero, we would still need some way to tell the value of each figure when writing a number. The invention of the Zero made it possible to drop the words or marks used to show place value or values, and to use the position of a figure in a number to show its value.
