Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode
Speaker 1: from our Earth Boil host Christian Sager. This one concerns
Speaker 1: that loneliest of numbers, not one, but zero. It's a
Speaker 1: strange one, and it may be older than anyone thought, Hey,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. In mathematics, zero has two meetings. It can
Speaker 1: mean nothing, I eat, I have zero dollars in my
Speaker 1: bank account, or it can serve as a placeholder that's
Speaker 1: part of a larger number, indicating that it is a
Speaker 1: multiple of ten. As Robert Kaplan details in his book
Speaker 1: The Nothing That Is a Natural History of Zero, about
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago, the ancient Sumerians, who lived in
Speaker 1: what is now a Rock came up with the basic
Speaker 1: concept of zero as a placeholder instead of the zero
Speaker 1: that we used today, though they drew complicated combinations of wedges, lines,
Speaker 1: and space is in clay tablets to indicate it. Kaplan
Speaker 1: explains that the concept was adopted by the Babylonians, who
Speaker 1: passed it along by way of the ancient Greeks to India,
Speaker 1: where Arab traders picked it up and eventually brought it
Speaker 1: back to medieval Europe. Somewhere along the way, the wedges
Speaker 1: that signified zero the placeholder evolved into a solid dot,
Speaker 1: which was the precursor of the zero that we know today.
Speaker 1: For a long time, it was believed that the earliest
Speaker 1: example of that was an inscription on the wall of
Speaker 1: a temple of Guali, or India, which dates back to
Speaker 1: seventh century CE. But now researchers have found evidence of
Speaker 1: an even earlier example. The Bakshali Manuscript, and Indian mathematical
Speaker 1: text written on seventy pieces of birch bark, was discovered
Speaker 1: back in one by someone digging in the soil in
Speaker 1: the village of Bakshali in what is now Pakistan. The
Speaker 1: exact age of the manuscript has long been a subject
Speaker 1: of controversy, but the most authoritative answer to date, based
Speaker 1: on an analysis by Japanese scholar Toko Hayashi, seemed to
Speaker 1: place it between seven hundred and eleven hundred CE. Recently, though,
Speaker 1: the University of Oxford's Bodlian Libraries, which has possessed the
Speaker 1: manuscript since nineteen o two, commissioned a carbon dating study
Speaker 1: of it. The new study revealed that the manuscript actually
Speaker 1: may date as far back as two hundred to three
Speaker 1: hundred CE, making it the oldest example of the dot
Speaker 1: that later evolved into zero now. According to Bodlian's press release,
Speaker 1: the concept of zero as a number in its own right,
Speaker 1: one with a value of nothing, didn't come along until
Speaker 1: several centuries after the Bakshali manuscript was written. It first
Speaker 1: appears in a text by the Indian astronomer and mathematician
Speaker 1: Drama Google. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Keiger
Speaker 1: and produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Clang. For more
Speaker 1: on this and a non zero number of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is a production
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