Zero is where it all begins. The use of zero is well known today. But where did it come from? Everything is created, it does not just show up. The use of zero predates the twenty-first century. It is one of the largest controversies of all time. Present day math and even ancient math would not have been the same without it. Zero was conspicuously absent from most early number systems and all earlier civilizations. So where did it come from? No one knows exactly where and when it was invented, nor who invented it. The origin of zero is controversial. Many believe it was invented around 500 B.C., but each civilization/culture has their own theory.
Present day zero is quite different from its previous forms. Many concepts have been passed down, and many have been forgotten. Zero is the only number that is neither positive of negative. It has no effect on any quantity. Zero is a number lower than one. It is considered an item that is empty. There are two common uses of zero: 1. an empty place indicator in a number system, 2. the number itself, zero. Zero exist everywhere; although it took many civilizations to establish it.
In the Roman civilization there was no symbol for zero. Romans used the word “nulla” for an empty space. The word nulla meant “nothing”; what our common day zero means. Romans had a very unorganized number system. It was full of flaws. With no use of zero, there was absolutely no way for counting above several thousand units. When the Roman Empire fell in 300 A.D., the introduction and adaptation of Arabic numerals, today's decimal numbers, took place. Thus, the invention of zero, nothing, was a huge leap forward in Roman history.
The Greek civilization, on the other hand, believed the use ...
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...t actually be dead. “And here is the one good thing: / If [Zero is] alive, then so, briefly, are [the children]” (7). This abandonment of reality did not necessarily happen or may have been transient, but Zero simply maintains its existence as a possibility.
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Fractions have been a around long enough for me to understand that I do not like them, but they play a significant part in simplifying, for some, division of goods or time. There is no one person who can be credited with the invention of fractions, but their use has been traced back as early as 1000 BC, in Egypt--using the formula to trade tangibles, currency, and build pyramids.
For as long as long as history has been recorded there has been interest in how the universe came to be. The science community seems to agree that the big bang was what created the universe, but there are many conflicting arguments surrounding what existed before the big bang and what initiated it. While there are nearly infinite responses to this question, there are only two paths one can take when answering it; either something existed prior to the big bang or the entire universe came from nothing. Lawrence M. Krauss, acclaimed physicist and cosmologist, uses his understanding of science in his book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, to elucidate that it is logical for something to come from nothing. Krauss recognizes that much of the world attributes the creation to God and quotes Steven Weinberg in saying that “science does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to believe in God” (183). Using the big bang theory, the discovery of both dark matter and energy, and the idea that many features of the universe do come from nothing Krauss makes a convincing argument that the universe did indeed come about with no preexistence.
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In 500 B.C. the abacus was first used by the Babylonians as an aid to simple arithmetic. In 1623 Wihelm Schickard (1592 - 1635) invented a "Calculating Clock". This mechanical machine could add and subtract up to 6 digit numbers, and warned of an overflow by ringing a bell. J. H. Mueller comes up with the idea of the "difference engine", in 1786. This calculator could tabulate values of a polynomial. Muellers attempt to raise funds fails and the project was forgotten. Scheutz and his son Edward produced a 3rd order difference engine with a printer in 1843 and their government agreed to fund their next project.
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They constructed the 12-month calendar which they based on the cycles of the moon. Other than that, they also created a mathematical system based on the number 60 which they called the Sexagesimal. Though, our mathematics today is not based on their system it acts like a foundation for some mathematicians. They also used the basic mathematics- addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, in keeping track of their records- one of their contributions to this world, bookkeeping. It was also suggested that they even discovered the number of the pi for they knew how to solve the circumference of the circle (Atif, 2013).
While the 1930s was not a tremendous period of cosmological, scientific advances, it was the epoch of the theory that the universe began with some explosion of a singularity of matter. In 1927, George Lemaître, an astronomer and Roman Catholic priest, was the first person to offer the theory that the universe was generated from an explosion of a primeval atom (Rich and Stingl 1). Lemaître’s findings were published in the 1931 scienc...
The history of math has become an important study, from ancient to modern times it has been fundamental to advances in science, engineering, and philosophy. Mathematics started with counting. In Babylonia mathematics developed from 2000B.C. A place value notation system had evolved over a lengthy time with a number base of 60. Number problems were studied from at least 1700B.C. Systems of linear equations were studied in the context of solving number problems.