What will happen without zero

However, during the Renaissance, zero became so powerful it caused passions to ignite once again. I mentioned the problem of division by zero earlier. The even trickier notion of dividing zero by zero is the basis of one of my favourite areas of mathematics — calculus. Calculus is the mathematics of change and gives us some nifty tricks that allow you to forecast what might happen in the future — from the spread of Ebola to the movement of the stock market.

A powerful tool, indeed. Since your attention might stray over time around that bit about Cartesian coordinates, for instance the line will wibble and wobble around. But if you zoom in close enough to any part of the curve it will still look like a straight line.

You can use calculus to describe how pretty much anything changes — from the movement of the stock market over time to the dispersal of medicine through our body. Without the concept of zero as a number, none of this would be possible. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Share using Email. By , when Hindu astronomer Brahmagupta was hard at work, Indian scientists were using the dotted zero as a full-blown figure—and treating it like second nature.

From India, zero spread—like fire, in some circles, and like cursed embers in other. It was most quickly and eagerly embraced in the Arab world.

What took everyone else so long? When medieval Christians were confronted with zero, they decided it was satanic —in claiming absence, they reasoned, the number turned against God—and banished it from use. Of course, the whole of the western world came around eventually. In the 17th century, zero did some heavy lifting for Isaac Newton, when he developed calculus.

Ittay Weiss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. A small dot on an old piece of birch bark marks one of the biggest events in the history of mathematics. The bark is actually part of an ancient Indian mathematical document known as the Bakhshali manuscript.

And the dot is the first known recorded use of the number zero. In a positional number system, such as the decimal system we use now, the location of a digit is really important. Indeed, the real difference between and 1,, is where the digit 1 is located, with the symbol 0 serving as a punctuation mark. Yet for thousands of years we did without it. The Sumerians of 5,BC employed a positional system but without a 0. In some rudimentary form , a symbol or a space was used to distinguish between, for example, and But that symbol was never used at the end of a number, so the difference between 5 and had to be determined by context.

That suggests that zero, even for adults, takes an extra effort of brain power to process. We may not be born with the ability to understand zero. But our capacity to learn it may have deep evolutionary roots, as some new science shows us.

The fourth step in thinking of zero — that is thinking of zero as a symbol — may be unique to humans. But a surprising number of animals can get to step three: recognizing that zero is less than one. The bees chose the blank page 60 to 70 percent of the time.

And they were significantly better at discriminating a large number, like six, from zero, than they were in discriminating one from zero. Just like the kids. Her research group is hoping to understand how bees do these calculations in their minds, with the goal of one day using those insights to build more efficient computers. In similar experiments, researchers have shown that monkeys can recognize the empty set and are often better at it than 4-year-old humans.

But the fact that bees can do it is kind of amazing, considering how far they are away from us on the evolutionary trees of life. We humans might have only come to understand zero as a number 1, years ago. There are still great mysteries about zero. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Nothing is fascinating. What is zero, anyway? Now take another empty box, and place it in the first one. How many things are in the first box now? Why is zero so profound as a human idea? Often, monkeys are better at recognizing zero than little kids are.