Zero (0)- Shunya
Development of zero as a mathematical concept may have been inspired by India’s long philosophical tradition and a culture that is quite happy to conceive of the void (Shunya- symbol of Brahman,Atharva Veda, 14.1.1), to conceive of the infinite (Isha Upanishad ,Yajur Veda, 16.54)
ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पुर्णमुदच्यते
पूर्णश्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥
Om, That (Outer World) is Purna (Full with Divine Consciousness,infinite); This (Inner World) is also Purna (Full with Divine Consciousness); …
From Purna is manifested Purna (From the Fullness of Divine Consciousness the World is manifested),
2: Taking Purna from Purna, Purna indeed remains (Because Divine Consciousness is Non-Dual and Infinite)
Acharya Pingala (c. 3rd/2nd century BC) an ancient Indian mathematician used the Sanskrit word śūnya explicitly to refer to zero in his text Chandaḥśāstra (also called Pingala-sutras)
Aryabhata(AD 476–550) in his masterpiece ‘Aryabhatiya’ describes a decimal-based rule for zero, which states sthānāt sthānaṁ daśaguṇaṁ syāt “from place to place each is ten times the preceding.”. To indicate orders of magnitude in a number system, eg, denoting 10s,100s,1000s
Brahmagupta (born c. AD 598 , died c. AD 668 ) in his text called Brahmasphutasiddhanta(628 AD), which is the first document to discuss zero as a number and formulate the concept of zero.
His book provides rules for arithmetic manipulations that apply to zero and treat zero as a number in its own right, rather than as simply a placeholder digit like in many ancient text from ancient Indians, Mayans and Babylonians.
The Bakhshali manuscript is oldest ancient Indian mathematical text written on birch bark, found in 1881 in the village of Bakhshali, near Peshawar. It uses a dot as a place holder for representing zero. The dot symbol came to be called the shunya-bindu.
In 2017, three samples from the manuscript were radio carbon dated, came out from three different centuries, from AD 224–383, 680–779, and 885–993, making it the world’s oldest recorded origin of the #ZERO symbol which is very close to the symbol that we use as zero today.
Despite developing sophisticated geometry, Greeks had no symbol for zero.
9thC Brahmagupta’s texts were translated into Arabic by Muhammad al-Fazari and mathematician Al-Khwarizmi into a text called al-Jam wal-tafriq bi hisal-al-Hind(Addition and Subtraction in Indian Arithmetic)
It was translated into Latin in the 13th century as Algorithmi de numero indorum.
The Europeans, even when it was introduced to them, were like ‘Why would we need a number for nothing?’ and banned it in 1299, Florence Italy. However accepted it in late 15th C.
