1
00:00:02,040 --> 00:00:07,240
Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff.

2
00:00:07,320 --> 00:00:10,600
Speaker 1: In mathematics, zero has two meanings. It can mean nothing,

3
00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:13,400
Speaker 1: I eat, I have zero dollars in my bank account,

4
00:00:13,600 --> 00:00:16,040
Speaker 1: or it can serve as a placeholder that's part of

5
00:00:16,040 --> 00:00:19,600
Speaker 1: a larger number, indicating that it is a multiple of ten.

6
00:00:20,200 --> 00:00:24,119
Speaker 1: As Robert Kaplan details in his book The Nothing That

7
00:00:24,320 --> 00:00:28,080
Speaker 1: Is a Natural History of Zero, about five thousand years ago,

8
00:00:28,160 --> 00:00:30,640
Speaker 1: the ancient Sumerians, who lived in what is now a

9
00:00:30,760 --> 00:00:34,800
Speaker 1: rock came up with the basic concept of zero as

10
00:00:34,800 --> 00:00:38,280
Speaker 1: a placeholder instead of the zero that we used today,

11
00:00:38,280 --> 00:00:43,520
Speaker 1: though they drew complicated combinations of wedges, lines, and spaces

12
00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:47,360
Speaker 1: in clay tablets to indicate it. Kaplan explains that the

13
00:00:47,440 --> 00:00:50,960
Speaker 1: concept was adopted by the Babylonians, who passed it along

14
00:00:51,200 --> 00:00:54,480
Speaker 1: by way of the ancient Greeks to India, where Arab

15
00:00:54,560 --> 00:00:57,400
Speaker 1: traders picked it up and eventually brought it back to

16
00:00:57,560 --> 00:01:01,600
Speaker 1: medieval Europe. Somewhere along the way, the wedges that signified

17
00:01:01,720 --> 00:01:06,280
Speaker 1: zero the placeholder evolved into a solid dot, which was

18
00:01:06,319 --> 00:01:09,679
Speaker 1: the precursor of the zero that we know today. For

19
00:01:09,720 --> 00:01:12,960
Speaker 1: a long time, it was believed that the earliest example

20
00:01:13,080 --> 00:01:15,720
Speaker 1: of that was an inscription on the wall of a

21
00:01:15,760 --> 00:01:19,920
Speaker 1: temple of Guali, or India, which dates back to seventh

22
00:01:19,920 --> 00:01:24,720
Speaker 1: century CE. But now researchers have found evidence of an

23
00:01:24,720 --> 00:01:30,760
Speaker 1: even earlier example. The Bakshali Manuscript, and Indian mathematical text

24
00:01:30,840 --> 00:01:34,640
Speaker 1: written on seventy pieces of birch bark, was discovered back

25
00:01:34,720 --> 00:01:38,520
Speaker 1: in one by someone digging in the soil in the

26
00:01:38,600 --> 00:01:42,640
Speaker 1: village of Bakshali in what is now Pakistan. The exact

27
00:01:42,720 --> 00:01:46,600
Speaker 1: age of the manuscript has long been a subject of controversy,

28
00:01:46,680 --> 00:01:49,880
Speaker 1: but the most authoritative answer to date, based on an

29
00:01:49,880 --> 00:01:55,080
Speaker 1: analysis by Japanese scholar Toko Hayashi, seemed to place it

30
00:01:55,160 --> 00:02:00,920
Speaker 1: between seven hundred and eleven hundred CE. Recently, the University

31
00:02:00,920 --> 00:02:05,720
Speaker 1: of Oxford's Bodlian Libraries, which has possessed the manuscript since

32
00:02:05,840 --> 00:02:09,400
Speaker 1: nineteen o two, commissioned a carbon dating study of it.

33
00:02:09,760 --> 00:02:13,519
Speaker 1: The new study revealed that the manuscript actually may date

34
00:02:13,560 --> 00:02:17,200
Speaker 1: as far back as two hundred to three hundred CE,

35
00:02:17,400 --> 00:02:21,120
Speaker 1: making it the oldest example of the dot that later

36
00:02:21,280 --> 00:02:25,680
Speaker 1: evolved into zero now. According to Bodlian's press release, the

37
00:02:25,720 --> 00:02:28,440
Speaker 1: concept of zero as a number in its own right,

38
00:02:28,560 --> 00:02:31,760
Speaker 1: one with a value of nothing, didn't come along until

39
00:02:31,840 --> 00:02:37,200
Speaker 1: several centuries after the Bakshali Manuscript was written, it first

40
00:02:37,200 --> 00:02:41,800
Speaker 1: appears in a text by the Indian astronomer and mathematician

41
00:02:42,400 --> 00:02:51,200
Speaker 1: Rama Gupta. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger,

42
00:02:51,360 --> 00:02:53,840
Speaker 1: produced by Tristan McNeil, and For more on this and

43
00:02:53,919 --> 00:03:08,799
Speaker 1: other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com.