The Origin of Zero
Although the great practice of the invention is attributed to the Hindu zero, partial or limited development of the concept of zero are evident in several other numbering systems at least as old as the Hindu system, if not more. But the real effect of any of these steps earlier on the full development of the concept of zero - if indeed it had any effect - it is not clear.The Babylonian sexagesimal system used in the mathematical and astronomical texts was essentially a positional system, although the concept of zero was not fully developed. Many of the boards Babylonian only indicate a space between groups of symbols when a particular power of 60 was not necessary, so that the powers involved spot 60 should be determined in part by the context. In the later Babylonian tablets (those of the last three centuries BC) is a symbol used to indicate a power absent, but this only occurred within a numeric group and not the end. When the Greeks continued the development of astronomical tables, the system explicitly chose to express their Babylonian sexagesimal fractions, not the Egyptian system of unit fractions. The repeated subdivision of a part in 60 smaller parts needed that sometimes "not a part of a" unit was involved, so that the tables in the Almagest of Ptolemy (c.150 AD) include the symbol or 0 to indicate this. Much later, about AD 500, Greek texts used the Omicron, which is the first letter of the Greek word oudem ("nothing"). Previously, Omicron, restricted to represent the number 70, its value in the regular alphabetical arrangement.Perhaps the earliest systematic use of a symbol for zero in a system of relative value is in the mathematics of the Maya of Central America and South Mayan zero symbol was used to indicate the absence of any units of the various orders of the base system twenty modified. This system was used much more likely to record the time schedules than for computational purposes.It is possible that the oldest Hindu symbol for zero was the point bold type, that appears in the manuscript Bakhshali, whose content may go back the third or fourth century AD, although some historians to locate in the twelfth century. Any combination of the small circle of the Hindus, the most common, with the symbol used by the Greeks would be only a conjecture.As the oldest form of the Hindu symbol was commonly used in inscriptions and manuscripts to mark a blank space, was called Sunya, meaning "gap" or "empty". This word came into Arabic as sifr, meaning "vague". She was transliterated into Latin as zephirum zephyrum or around the year 1200, keeping their sound but not meaning. Successive changes of these forms, including by passing zeuero, and encrypt zepiro led our words "cipher" and "zero". The double meaning of the word "cipher" today - both can refer to the zero symbol as any digit - did not occur in the original Hindu.Source: Topics in the History of Mathematics for use in the classroom, numbers and numerals, Bernard Gundlach.
