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Origins: On Nothing

The simple discovery of zero radically changed how we imagine and act on the world.

The question that dominates so much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is “What has the Hobbit in his pocket?” What wonderful fiction! Even more wonderful was the secret ring brought back from the East by tenth-century A.D. Arab travelers. This ring gave them immense power in commerce, science and mathematics; and after much resistance in the West, it eventually came to belong to everyone: the hollow ring of zero. Arab merchants learned of zero from such Indian mathematicians as the Hindu philosopher Aryabhata (c. 476–550 A.D.) and the Jain philosopher Mahavira (c. 800–870 A.D.). But the […]

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Footnotes

1.

Sumer, the earliest major civilization in Mesopotamia, included the city-states of Eridu, Ur, Nippur and Uruk. Sumer is also a somewhat fluid place-name referring to the southernmost region of Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.

2.

See Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s article on the origins of counting, “One Two … Three,” Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 2002.

3.

To understand how this could possibly be, see chapter 15 of the author’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).