HS508: Indian Knowledge Systems

Reflection note on ‘Development of the Indian numerals (And how they became “Arabic”)’.
Rajas P. Shah | 17110118 | Submission date: 28/02/2020
Typeface: Palatino Linotype, 11, 1.5 spacing. Word count:461.

Why India invented the zero – two thoughts beyond the mathematical need.

India is many-a-times said to be the real birthplace of calculus, infinite series, etc. amongst

others. It has also been nearly established that the Indian numerals are actually the Arabic

numerals widely used today – the subject of today’s talk. However, in my view, perhaps the

most important contribution of India to science was that of zero. This is not because it is

something incredibly complex, this is because it was something so simple, yet no other culture

identified it.

It was, as one can think, a thought slightly ahead of its time, since eventually formal algebraic

demands would have made some mathematicians realize its necessity and thus develop a

symbol for ‘nothing’. I am asserting this because, if one looks at the factorial notation (n! =

n(n-1)! = n(n-1)(n-2)! .. and so on…), and eventually, when one defines factorials of numbers

other than the natural numbers, one needs that 0! be equal to 1. For a demonstration, let’s take

the combination formula: nCr is the number of ways of selecting r items from a pool of n items
𝑛!
without repetition when the order is not important, and is given by: 𝑛𝐶𝑟 = . Now, for
𝑟!(𝑛−𝑟)!

r=0, it means selecting zero objects out of n, which only has one way. But the formula has 1/0!

As the answer. Thus, the value of 0! came to be defined as 1, out of need for continuity and
satisfaction of the first principles.

But was the Indian invention of the shunya or zero only based on satisfying mathematical

quantities? I don’t think so. I believe there must be more purposes at play, which is why,

despite a few other contemporary cultures being as advanced as us that time, only India

invented the zero. Firstly, I think there is this importance given to everything getting reset,

getting restarted once in a large number of years. This belief of everything getting reset brings

us to a stage where certain attributes of human civilization are believed to come to nothing,

come to a state which could not be quantified with the existing numbers, since assigning any
of them would give it some attribute, which was contradictory. Hence came a number to be

used to quantify nothing at all; this void, this origin was called the zero.

Not just that, there is another common concept that comes to mind – that of the balance of

good and bad deeds over a person’s lifetime – a concept very popular in Hindu beliefs. Now,

for one’s deeds to balance, there must be a numerical entity that accounts for the net of them.

At balance point, this entity equals the number zero – nothing overall (as opposed to above

where, there was nothing at all).