MUCH ADO

To the guy who invented “zero” – Thanks for nothing

What’s so funny about this? OK, I’ll admit that the cartoon accompanying this short little joke packs a lot more punch than the words themselves. Of course, pictures usually do. But I felt it would be worth mentioning just who the “guy” was who invented the concept of zero. Naturally, we don’t know his or her name or race or nationality. But we do have a very approximate time. When I took Latin, we had to learn the Roman numerals which was a number system based on 7 and which didn’t have a zero. We were told that it was the Arabs who introduced zero when their empire spread out in the 3rd through the 6th centuries, along with their system based on 10 (note the zero). But later I learned that the Arabs got the idea from India. Apparently there were Indians in the western hemisphere who had it too, namely the Maya. To add to the confusion, some say the Egyptians had to have it to do the calculations necessary to build the pyramids; and