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