Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: In mathematics, zero has two meanings. It can mean nothing,
Speaker 1: I eat, I have zero dollars in my bank account,
Speaker 1: or it can serve as a placeholder that's part of
Speaker 1: a larger number, indicating that it is a multiple of ten.
Speaker 1: As Robert Kaplan details in his book The Nothing That
Speaker 1: Is a Natural History of Zero, about five thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: the ancient Sumerians, who lived in what is now a
Speaker 1: rock came up with the basic concept of zero as
Speaker 1: a placeholder instead of the zero that we used today,
Speaker 1: though they drew complicated combinations of wedges, lines, and spaces
Speaker 1: in clay tablets to indicate it. Kaplan explains that the
Speaker 1: concept was adopted by the Babylonians, who passed it along
Speaker 1: by way of the ancient Greeks to India, where Arab
Speaker 1: traders picked it up and eventually brought it back to
Speaker 1: medieval Europe. Somewhere along the way, the wedges that signified
Speaker 1: zero the placeholder evolved into a solid dot, which was
Speaker 1: the precursor of the zero that we know today. For
Speaker 1: a long time, it was believed that the earliest example
Speaker 1: of that was an inscription on the wall of a
Speaker 1: temple of Guali, or India, which dates back to seventh
Speaker 1: century CE. But now researchers have found evidence of an
Speaker 1: even earlier example. The Bakshali Manuscript, and Indian mathematical text
Speaker 1: written on seventy pieces of birch bark, was discovered back
Speaker 1: in one by someone digging in the soil in the
Speaker 1: village of Bakshali in what is now Pakistan. The exact
Speaker 1: age of the manuscript has long been a subject of controversy,
Speaker 1: but the most authoritative answer to date, based on an
Speaker 1: analysis by Japanese scholar Toko Hayashi, seemed to place it
Speaker 1: between seven hundred and eleven hundred CE. Recently, the University
Speaker 1: of Oxford's Bodlian Libraries, which has possessed the manuscript since
Speaker 1: nineteen o two, commissioned a carbon dating study of it.
Speaker 1: The new study revealed that the manuscript actually may date
Speaker 1: as far back as two hundred to three hundred CE,
Speaker 1: making it the oldest example of the dot that later
Speaker 1: evolved into zero now. According to Bodlian's press release, the
Speaker 1: 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: Rama Gupta. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger,
Speaker 1: produced by Tristan McNeil, and For more on this and
Speaker 1: other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com.