Is it possible to get something from nothing?
This is the story of a very important number, but a number that wasn't always a number.
In fact it was much less than a number until relatively recently.
This is the story of Zero
and it's a story that takes a tortuous and meandering route
through 1,500 years of human history.
Today we enjoy zero in all its glory where it takes on two roles:
The first is as a placeholder within our positional number system.
Zero notes an absence of a value
and it allows us to create huge numbers
without the need to create new digits
So we know 30 is larger than 3
and 300 is larger than 30 and 3.
The second use of zero is as a number in its own right,
the middleman between positive and negative one
and enjoying nearly all the same benefits as other numbers.
We can subtract, add and multiply by zero...
but dividing by zero just doesn't work.
For example, you can't divide 1 chicken by no chickens.
You might suggest that the answer is infinity, but it's not,
because infinity isn't really a number, it's a concept.
Mathematics developed from a very practical desire to count things,
such as the passage of days
or the quantities of chickens you owned.
To manage this, ancient civilisations developed rudimentary number systems,
for example the Babylonians used two symbols in different arrangements
to create unique numbers 1-60.
The Ancient Greeks and the Mayans also developed their own number systems
and all of these civilisations are thought to have created
their own rough concepts of zero as a placeholder.
But it wasn't until the Indians begun developing their own number system
that zero would be defined explicitly.
Their early number system would also evolve into the one we use today,
initially with 9 number symbols and then a small dot used to mark the absence of a number.
In the 7th Century mathematician Brahmagupta developed terms for zero in
addition, subtraction and division, although he struggled a bit with the latter,
as would academics for hundreds of years to come.
As the mathematics of India matured it found its way Eastwards to China and Westwards,
influencing the Islamic and Arabic cultures where it was instrumental in trade.
But Zero found resistance in Europe
as the Hindu-Arabic system was opposed by the
Roman Empire's established numeral system.
However, by the 13th Century academics such as Italian mathematician Fibonacci
were championing the new number system in their work,
helping zero gain a solid foothold across Europe.
Over the next 400 years as mathematics evolved from practical applications
to ever more abstracted functions, zero would form the cornerstone of calculus.
Calculus allowed anyone to break dynamic systems down
into smaller and smaller units approaching zero,
but cunningly avoided the trap of having to divide by zero.
Zero had now became a celebrated tool in the mathematical arsenal
and as the binary numerical system formed the foundation for modern computer programming,
zero once again stepped into the limelight to prove its worth.
And so it seems after all this time, it was finally possible to get something from nothing.