Zero was not invented by a single person or in a single place. The concept and the use of zero emerged gradually across several cultures over many centuries, with India playing a pivotal and widely recognized role. Key points
- Early placeholders: The idea of a placeholder to denote "no value" appears in Mesopotamian and other ancient systems, but these marks did not constitute a full algebraic zero as a number. This laid groundwork but did not define zero as a number in its own right.
- Indian origins as a number: By the 5th–7th centuries, Indian mathematicians and astronomers developed a positional number system that required a symbol for zero to distinguish place values, and zero began to be treated as a number with its own arithmetic rules. Brahmagupta (7th century) formalized operations involving zero, including rules for addition, subtraction, and the handling of zero with positive and negative numbers.
- Transmission to the world: The Indian numeral system, including the concept of zero, spread to the Islamic world, where scholars preserved and expanded on the mathematics, and later to Europe, where figures like Fibonacci helped popularize the system in the 12th–13th centuries.
- Earlier or concurrent threads: Some evidence points to even earlier uses of a placeholder symbol in other cultures, and the Sumerians and Maya had early notions related to absence or nothingness, but these did not constitute zero as a fully developed number within a complete decimal system in those contexts.
Concise takeaway
- While different cultures contributed foundational ideas related to nothingness and placeholders, zero as a number within a positional decimal system is most strongly attributed to India, with its formal treatment of zero as a number by Brahmagupta and earlier placeholder work by Indian scholars. The concept was then transmitted through the Islamic world to Europe, cementing zero’s central role in arithmetic and mathematics worldwide.
