Ripples In A Teacup

  I think I was around ten years old when I heard that Aryabhatta invented the zero. I had vision of this clever mathematician sitting on the banks of a river and conjuring up the zero. However, I soon became skeptical. How could someone invent the zero? I mean, if before the invention of zero, someone had two mangoes, she eats both of them, her friend asks her how many mangoes do you have left, what would she say? Would she be at a total loss for words because the zero hadn’t been invented until then? When I asked this question to my mother (a software engineer), she told me that what Aryabhatta invented was actually the concept of zero. At that point in time, I did not question her any further, though I did not fully comprehend what she told me. I hear about the “invention of zero” time and again and these days I want to scream, what was invented wasn’t zero, but the modern notation and symbol for zero. The concept of zero as a placeholder in positional numeral systems was in...