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Ah ha! It is arguably the most important number, and it may surprise you to know that it has not always been around.
Never has “nothing” been so important.
What two important roles does zero fill in our daily lives?
Find out by listening to the CultureCast above (by pressing the little blue play botton), or by clicking through and checking out the transcript and further sources.
Zero more than a hero (CultureCast #043)
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Transcript
Hello CultureCats, this is Joshua Hwang recounting the importance of nothing with another 90 Seconds to Culture podcast.
Zero: More than a hero
The number zero holds much more information than its deceptively simple roundness indicates.
Imagine the Roman numeral system: in the past these simple additive systems of counting and writing numbers down made simple mathematical operations very difficult. It’s easy now to say 40 plus 30 is 70, or four zero plus three zero equals seven zero. But much harder to figure out what XL plus XXX is. I know the potentials for dirty jokes are endless here. But the math is very hard. The answer by the way is LXX.
Zero allows us to add quickly because it is a placeholder. It shows the difference between 15 and 105. It allows us to quickly scale up from 10 to 1000.
In a separate but related function, the number zero represents the idea of nothing, a void or vacuum. Before there was no number like this, in hunting and even farming thought, one just needs to count tangible things. Numbers are only needed to reference objects: 5 goats, 2 chickens. It is a large leap to think about numbers in the abstract, then a further leap to think about nothingness and make it a number. In fact, some thought of it as philosophically odd to represent nothingness as something.
So either as a placeholder or as a representation of nothingness, this number, zero, amounts to much more than it seems.
Sources / Further Reading:
Wikipedia: Zero
Wikipedia: Positional Notation - Versus the roman numeral counting system.
Zero in Four Dimensions - A very comprehensive look at the history, impact, mathematics and much more of the number zero.
A History of Zero
[tags]mathematics, history, philosophy, zero, counting, culture, podcast[/tags]
(image from Eva the Weaver via Flickr)
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
A good topic. You told us why zero is important, but I feel like you could have focused more on things most people don’t already know about zero.
If you multiply anything by zero, it’s still zero. So I suggest we no longer pluralize zero as “zeros” or “zeroes”. Why not just say zero? I think it would be cool to say “A googol is a number represented by a one followed by one hundred zero”.
Also, you know Captain Planet? He’s our hero. He’ll take pollution down to zero.
Nice post. I always used to hear about the idea of zero itself and never understood the significance. One day I got it, while thinking about Roman numerals, and it really made my head hurt.
@Shan: Wow, that last line caught me off guard. Maybe subconsciously I was channeling Captain Planet, nice call.
On the “zeroes” note, I still think it’s more important how we think of the objects or things that decides how we pluralize them–rather than mathematical properties.
I just looked at the wikipedia page for English plural though, and now I don’t know what to think:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plurals
About things we don’t know about zero, what other aspects of zero should I have covered?
@Adeel: Yes, I actually think about Roman numerals a lot, and I think to myself, man everyone must have sucked at math back then.
If we don’t know it, how could you have covered it? As my favourite professor always said, you can’t judge if a painting of my mother is a good painting without knowing what my mother looks lke.
True, but on the other hand, the physicists claim to know how much we don’t know about the universe.
Maybe the historical introduction of zero?
Wow, Wikipedia has a whole section on distinguishing the number 0 from the letter O. Haha.
You should consider writing an entry on 1 - the loneliest number.