The Origin of Zero

I was listening to one of the amazing WNYC Radiolab podcasts this week. If you don’t listen to them, I’d highly recommend them. This one covered loops and how they can “hurt us, heal us, make us laugh, and, sometimes, leave us wanting more”. Within the podcast, Alex Bellows, proponent of creative mathematics and author of Here's Looking at Eucilid,  discusses one of the oldest and – he claims – mystical and spiritual loops: the number zero. Here’s what he had to say.

"Zero is the obvious loop. Its loop shape is part of why zero is zero…When I was a kid, I used to think that it was the hole with nothing in it, but actually zero was chosen by the Indians as reflecting the eternal cycles of the faces of heaven. The Romans and the Greeks and the Jews didn’t have a zero. We just started at one. One reason why we didn’t was because we were afraid of the void…"

Jab Abumrad and Robert Krulwich go on to dicuss how you could possibly describe something that isn’t there? There’s nothing to say and isn't that somehow or somewhat scary? It’s an emptiness and a nothingness and it means that you’re so alone that you don’t know where you are.

"...and so this was a psychological barrier to us grasping this zero. But in India, everything and nothing was the same thing. They had this sense of fluidity and they grasped this idea that nothingness was something".

And the way that they decided to represent this nothing-ness was to take a little piece of nothing and draw a circle around it, turning the nothing into a something – a loop, allowing it to embody eternity, continuity and infinity.