THE STORY OF ZERO

By:Maria Marquez, Ashley Pham,

and Sarah Berliner

WHAT IS THE STORY OF

ZERO
The story talks about how the numbers 1
through 9 would never give much attention to
zero and believed that zero wasnt needed.
That was until they needed the number ten, so
they used number one to represent ten.
However they could never distinguish the
difference between one and ten so they added
the number zero to stand next to one and that
way the other numbers could distinguish it.

CONCEPT
Where A is any quantity:
A + 0 = A,
A - 0 = A,
A * 0 = 0,
A / 0 = Not Defined

INVENTOR OF ZERO
Invented independently by:
Babylonians,
Mayans
Indians
The Babylonians got their number system from the
Sumerians, the first people in the world to develop a
counting system.

SOCIAL CLIMATE DURING

600 BC
The social climate around this time was after
beinAZ g destroyed and then rebuilt by the
Assyrians, Babylon became the capital of the
Neo-Babylonian Empire from 609 to 539 BC.

HOW WAS THIS CONCEPT

DISCOVERED

Discovered by Brahmagupta (650 AD):

First to formalize arithmetic operations using zero
Used dots underneath numbers to indicate a zero.
Dots were alternately referred to as 'sunya' (meaning
empty) or 'kha', (meaning place)
Wrote standard rules for reaching zero through:
Addition
Subtraction
Multiplication
Did not know the concept of dividing zero until Isaac
Newton and G.W. Leibniz tackled the concept.

HOW WAS IT USEFUL

It was the first concept to represent nothing.
It made it helped the place value system.
Helped numbers like 1 differ from 10.
Without the number zero it would be
harder to differentiate.

HOW IS IT USEFUL TODAY

Its useful when trying to represent nothing.
Represents place values.
The zero also has different rules among
multiplication and division.
Ex: Anything multiplied or divided by zero
will become zero.

Sources
Kaplan, Robert. "The History of Zero." The History Of
Zero. Yale, 2015. Web. 20 Jan. 2015.
Sastro. "The Story of Number Zero by Sastro." Redbubble.
N.p., 2015. Web. 20 Jan. 2015.
Szalay, Jessie. "Who Invented Zero?" LiveScience.
TechMedia Network, 28 June 2013. Web. 09 Feb. 2015.