LANGUAGE × TECHNOLOGY

The Invention of Nothing

628 CE

History · Middle Ages · Holocene · Meghalayan

Nothing had to be invented. Babylonian and Maya scribes had a mark for an empty place, but treating emptiness as a number, something to add, subtract and multiply, crystallised in India: place-value numerals with a zero, found in texts by the fifth century and in inscriptions from the early sixth, and then, around 628, Brahmagupta's explicit rules for calculating with it. Radiocarbon dating of the Bakhshali manuscript, with its small round dots, ignited a lively dispute about just how early the written zero goes.

Why it matters

Zero completed the ten digits with which almost all humanity now calculates, a notation so efficient that it won the world twice over, carried first by Arabic mathematicians and merchants, then adopted by a reluctant Europe that resisted the 'infidel' numeral into the fifteenth century. Every equation of physics, every line of code, every ledger runs on the acceptance that nothing is a quantity. No revolution on this timeline made less noise.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Zero grew in stages across Indian mathematics: a zero mark appears on copper inscriptions and stone tablets from the early sixth century, and in texts a century earlier, while Brahmagupta, around 628, first set out rules for zero as a number in its own right. Radiocarbon dating placed the earliest folio of the Bakhshali manuscript in the third or fourth century, but specialists object that a manuscript is dated by its latest folio, and they disagree over what its dots actually do.

Sources

1. Plofker et al. (2017), History of Science in South Asia · The Bakhshali manuscript: a response to the Bodleian Library's radiocarbon datingdoi:10.18732/h2xt07
2. Sinha & Sinha (2021), Jnanabha · Is zero different?doi:10.58250/jnanabha.2021.51210
3. Weiss (2017), The Conversation collection · Nothing matters: how the invention of zero helped create modern mathematicsdoi:10.64628/ab.qxdpwx4va

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