The Invention of Zero

Hey, guys, I had to do this for a Language Arts project-thingy. It's about how zero was invented and its importance in our world today...hurray and all that.


Okay, so before I start in on how zero was invented, I kind of have to go over how people got along WITHOUT it. Seriously, imagine not knowing the concept of zero. Think about it....

You are some MESOPOTAMIAN (hurray, Hammurabi!) person who is sitting around in your moose skins and pondering over this big stone rock thing your friend sent you. It's supposed to be your birthday present. Your friend is telling you that it is a cheque. He tells you to go deposit it at your local bank. So you do. EXCEPT...

The cheque has the number 23 on it. So your bank gives you 23....whatever those weird Mesopotamian people paid with. So you walk home all happy with your money, hurray....

UNTIL YOUR FRIEND ASKS YOU HOW YOU SPENT YOUR 2300 Mesopotamian objects that you pay with!

"What the heck?!" you say. "I only got 23 Mesopotamian currency items!"

And your friend just shrugs and says, "Too bad zero hasn't been invented yet." Because your friend is PSYCHIC and knows that zero will be invented in AD 650!!!! AAAAAAAH!!! So you sue your bank and you get ALL their money and they go bankrupt and everyone has to keep their money under their mattresses and then someone's goat comes along and eats all the money because he's hungry. And then we all blame Bush! (My psychiatrist is telling me to take deep breaths.)

Well, that was certainly an odd story. So you see why not having a zero to hold something's place could be a bit of an issue. I guess you could say people got along fine without it, as long as they paid attention to the context in which the number was used.

Zero as a number (you know, the number between -1 and 1) was also ignored until AD 650. (Technically, the empty place-holder was invented before, but now they were used as the same concept, which really ties them together.)

So now we'll talk about the actual invention, instead of me going off on random rants.

As I said (kind of) before, AD 650 was when zero as a number and zero as an empty placeholder were recognized as sort of the same thing.

After the Indians did that in 65o, there were some IMPORTANT CHANGES!!! HURRAY!!!!

Communication was better. Instead of misinterpretations/confusions of numbers like 45 and 405, people didn't face that problem! They could just write a little circle! CIRCLES ARE FUN! And, by the way, the zero symbol of the Indians in 650 looked very close to our symbol. Very close. Very. Close. Ooooh...scary.

Education was better I guess... so now teachers could teach with big huge numbers like 780,000,000,000,000 and not have their students accidentally writing 78. And failing and ending up working at McHammurabi's or dying early or whatever uneducated people did. Another one of my rants. I apologize. All I'm really trying to say is that now mathematicians and teachers and students could work on math problems. Take Quadratic equations, for instance. Without zero, the only way to find x-intercepts would be to graph the number EVERY SINGLE TIME! Fun.

Government changed: The government could now number laws differently and more efficiently. It also allowed for generalization numbers, like death tolls or polls or people who are for Obama. For instance, now we could say that over 1,000,000 people think that the writer of this blog is an amazing person, instead of just guessing. Because you can't really have that many tally marks. Seriously. You'd get carpal tunnel.


And now we FINALLY move on to zero today.

When was the new millenium? When?

Who knows?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Have you all fallen asleep on me?

Okay, you.

January 1, 2000?

Really?

NO!

It was actually January 1, 2001. Because we never had a zero year. Because when we established this calendar, zero wasn't even invented yet!!!

SO YOU WERE WRONG!!! AND SO WERE ALL THOSE MANUFACTURERS THAT MADE THOSE LITTLE GLASS THINGYS THAT ALL THOSE PEOPLE BOUGHT AND PUT IN THEIR CHINA CABINETS!!!! AAAAAAAAAH!


And that concludes my amazingly long post about the importance of zero.

Well, it wasn't THAT long, but oh, well. Too bad you lost all your money to that goat. Better hurry and get to the stock market before the goat.

NOTE!!! THIS CITATION IS NOT QUITE CORRECT BECAUSE BLOGGER WON'T UNDERLINE! OR DO THE HANGING INDENT!!!! I'm turning in a hard copy that is correct.



Works Cited

Durough, Bob. "My Hero, Zero." Perf. Bob Durough. Schoolhouse Rock, 1973.

“History of Zero, A.” MacTutor History of Mathematics. 2000. 30 Sept 2008.

Johnson, George. "Before & After; Order of Magnitude: The Toll and the Technology." New York Times (16 Sep. 2001): 3. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. 8 Oct. 2008 .

Prasad, T.K. “Vedic Mathematics: Positional Number System.” WSU College of Engineering and Computer Science. 5 Oct 2008.