Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff. In mathematics, zero has two meanings. 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 spaces
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, 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
Rama Gupta. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger, produced by Tristan McNeil, and For more on this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com.