Pacific Number Zero Essay

Throughout history, mathematics has played a major role in humanities existence. The global need to count and use math developed through numerous mathematical systems in societies, such as, Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan, Roman, and Hindu-Arabic. However, the number “zero” did not exist in the early age of math. Numbers were initially used to count things; counting-wise, it does not make sense to count something “zero”, thus zero was not used until later in the history. I consider zero to be the most interesting number because it represents nothing and everything all together. Nowadays, zero is still a mystery to people confusing humanity for thousands of years. The magical number, zero, mainly began its use as a placeholder in mathematics. As described in the following, “Between 700 and 300 B.C., the Babylonians started using their end-of-sentence symbol to show that a place was being skipped” (B&G, p.79). They did not write the symbol of “0” as a placeholder but instead an “end-of-sentence” symbol to represent (B&G, p. 79). In fact, zero means nothing when it comes to counting things, but

Later on, the Indians thought that a place indicator also should be considered as a number as well. In addition, the number “zero” was not recognized as a number until the Hindu-Arabic discovered the importance of zero, thus, it “was a key unlocking the door of algebra” (B&G, p. 80). In algebra, zero is quite special. For example, when you are trying to find a straight line that intersects on either x or y-axis on a plane (y=mx+b) given that m and b are constant. The fastest way to find x and y is that we will plug in 0 into x in order to find y, vise versa. The idea of plugging in zero to find either x or y indicates where x and y locate on the axes when one of them equates 0. Algebra shows where math gets into abstract concepts involving more dimensional