What purpose did zero serve in ancient mathematics?
What purpose did zero serve in ancient mathematics? What purpose does it serve in modern mathematics?
Please provide your source if possible. Please Cite it! Thank you.
Interesting…
1/1=1 (You have 1 cookie to divide by on kid, how many cookies does each kid get? One)
0/1=0 (You have zero cookies to divide by one kid, how many cookies does each kid get? Zero)
1/0=? (You have 1 cookie to divide by zero kids, how many cookies does each kid get?)
Hmmm… If a 1 tree falls in the woods and zero people are around to hear it, does it make a sound? If “yes”, the answer is 1, if “no”, the answer is 1, if the answer is a philosophical conundrum, the answer is “?”. (Using binary to answer the question – yes or no would be “something”, therefore = 1; but no response does not necessarily equal zero.)
Apparently anything divided by zero actually equals infinity… But they also said Pluto was a planet until last year. If we get enough people to sign a petition stating that anything divided by zero equals corn-dog, I think we could change mathematics as we know it.
Zero as a number did not come into use until the 9th century in India, so it served virtually no purpose in ancient mathematics. It existed as a concept for the Babylonians and Greeks, but was not used in calculations.
I knew this from studying the history of mathematics. But check out Wikipedia’s article on zero.
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Originally zero was just a place holder. We’re able to write any value we want using just ten digits. When we count 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on up to 9, we can just start again by writing "10" instead of introducing more and more symbols. The "0" here lets us know that the "1" is in the tens place and thus means one value of ten. So 0 acts as a place-holder for numerals.
The idea of zero being a number itself was avoided for a long time, but one way that it came into practical use was in dealing with tax collecting. Having negative values to represent debt is not so easy to calculate unless you have a 0, so you can apply the same math of addition and subtraction.
A really great book on the subject is Charles Seife’s "Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea."
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BS & MS in mathematics
a big lonely zero is what the teachers used to write on most of my math tests. it means there is nothing there for you.
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Interesting…
1/1=1 (You have 1 cookie to divide by on kid, how many cookies does each kid get? One)
0/1=0 (You have zero cookies to divide by one kid, how many cookies does each kid get? Zero)
1/0=? (You have 1 cookie to divide by zero kids, how many cookies does each kid get?)
Hmmm… If a 1 tree falls in the woods and zero people are around to hear it, does it make a sound? If “yes”, the answer is 1, if “no”, the answer is 1, if the answer is a philosophical conundrum, the answer is “?”. (Using binary to answer the question – yes or no would be “something”, therefore = 1; but no response does not necessarily equal zero.)
Apparently anything divided by zero actually equals infinity… But they also said Pluto was a planet until last year. If we get enough people to sign a petition stating that anything divided by zero equals corn-dog, I think we could change mathematics as we know it.
References :