When was zero first used in mathematical operations

But the European merchants used it illegally and by the end of the 13th century some books got published for mathematical operations, and so it became common in Europe also. The most common number system we use is the Hindi-Arabic number system. Now zero is being widely used in a binary numeral system with base 2. In digital electronics like a computer, this number system is being used. It is because there is a lot of difference between the discovery and invention of the term.

And giving someone credit for this would be inappropriate. So the real thing is Zero was Discovered not invented. Either we can say the concept of zero was discovered. Discovery is to know something that already exists, and the invention is to create something totally new.

Zero was already present and some mathematicians just discovered the concept of it. They gave the rules to compute with it. Most of the civilizations were using it in ancient times as a symbol. But the first use of it as a place holder did by the Indians.

And, here today we use zero as an oval shape in our number system. It might seem odd to take a moment in our technology-driven lives to contemplate the humble and mysterious zero, the pivot upon which mathematics rotates upon.

At a time where zero underpins practically everything we do, being an essential part of the binary code which saturates our world, the origins of where it came from prove interesting.

The University of Oxford, which recently published research findings which have pushed back the first recorded use of zero to a 3rd century CE Indian manuscript, clearly thinks so. The findings, involving the carbon dating of an ancient mathematical treatise, the Bakhshila Manuscript, have opened up the door in terms of revealing the provenance of the elusive zero. In mathematics, the main difference between the two is that whether there is evidence that it was used in equations, and thus is a repeatable phenomenon.

Placeholder zeros have been present for thousands of years. According to Harvard math professor Robert Kaplan, they were first documented 5, years ago in Mesopotamia with the Sumerians using them. Both the Chinese, with their mathematical model of counting sticks, and the Babylonians were clearly also aware of the concept of zero, but only as just that: a placeholder concept, something that could not be replicated with the same outcome each and every time a particular equation was used.

The concept then spread from Mesopotamia to places like China, Babylon, and India — but it was only the latter who made it more than just an idea.

Mathematics at the time was more an expression of philosophical ideas and reasoning, and directed towards more abstract studies like astronomy, as opposed to commerce.

This explains why zero could never have been conceptualised in the West. The Greeks, whose astronomical models and mathematical equations certainly did influence their Indian counterparts, abhorred the very idea of nothingness.

Pre-Socratic schools of thought contended that there could be no such thing as nothing. India, on the other hand, proved fertile ground for the evolution of zero from a placeholder to a numeral. The discovery of Zero is the greatest abstraction of the human mind. It is not wrong to say that the concept or the invention of zero was revolutionary in mathematics. Zero is a symbol for the concept of nothingness or having nothing. Before it, mathematicians struggled to perform the simplest arithmetic calculations.

But the question arises from where zero number first appears? Zero was fully developed in India around fifth century AD or first time about zero is talked in India only. In mathematics it is really vibrant in the Indian subcontinent. First place to see the ideally zero beginning to be born is from Bakhshali manuscript dating back to the third or fourth century. It is said that a farmer in dug up the text from a field in the Bakhshali village near Peshawar today is Pakistan.

It is quite a complicated document because it is not just a one piece of document, but it consists of many pieces written over a pace quite a century back. With the help of radiocarbon dating technique, which is a method for measuring the content of carbon isotopes in organic material to determine its age shows that the Bakhshali manuscript consists of several texts.

This manuscript has 70 leaves of birch bark and contains hundreds of zeros in the form of dots. Source: www.