Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.” The post has almost 14 million views.
Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.” The post has almost 14 million views.
Basically, what we call “Arabic Numerals”, including the number 0, have their origin in India. Europe got them from Arabic scholars, and therefore called them “Arabic”.
The main factor is the decimal system of writing and having the concept of a zero in contrast to the odd, additive and subtractive writing of the Roman numerals, which didn’t even know a 0, and made multiplication a pain and division nearly impossible.
What glyph is actually used for a one, be it a 1 or a ١, is absolutely secondary.
I want to correct something. They knew what nothing meant. They just didn’t conceptualize the absence of things as a number. And honestly, it’s a bit weird, but it is useful. You can’t have 0 apples, but the concept is useful for math.
Of course they knew what nothing meant. They even had a word for it: nullum. Sounds familiar, somehow. But the key is to apply this to math, and having an actual symbol for it.
I have 0 apples right now, and most of the time!
Arguably, sure. The way they’d understand it is you don’t have apples though, not that you have zero. With our understanding, it makes some sense, but I’d say even today that’s odd to say. It isn’t wrong, but it is strange to say you posses everything in the universe (and anything else too), just in quantities of zero. It makes more sense to say you don’t possess them.