Yes, we have no zeros!

Well surprisingly we didn't always have a zero. Up until the 12th century AD you could say "Yes, we have no parsnips". But you couldn't write down 'parsnips = 0'. The number zero hadn't yet come to Europe. At that time it was alive and well and living in the Arab world. Infact it had been doing so for a number of centuries.

The first record of it being used was in India in the 9th century AD. Zero only arrived here in the 12th century along with a whole batch of its friends: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - these being the first 10 Cardinal or Natural numbers.

All these numbers were introduced by an Italian merchant whose name might be familiar to you - Fibonacci (pronounced fee-boh-nach-ee). Fibonacci traded between Italy and North Africa so was well acquainted with Arab culture.

Fibonacci is famous for his series(0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etc.) which has recently come to public attention with the book and film The Da Vinci Code. However, few would doubt his most important contribution to mathematics was the introduction of the Arab number system. The new numerals along with many mathematical methods(e.g.long multiplication & division) are described in his book "Liber Abacci" (pronounced lee-ber ab-ah-chee).

The word "zero" appears to have come (surprise surprise!) from the Arab world too, but evolved through through various languages from an almost unrecognizable root.

sifr(Arab) zephyrus(Greek) zephirum(Latin) zefiro(Venetian) zero(Italian)

Zero is such an important number; perhaps the most important. It is especially useful for describing very large and very small numbers. Here are some examples of its use. You may have heard some of these names before. Now you can appreciate where the words come from.

a googol - 10 to the power of 100 (10¹⁰⁰)

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

...a really big number you will agree!

But here's an even bigger one:

a googolplex - 10 to the power of a googol (10^googol)

As a way of imagining how big even a googol is: it is estimated that there are between 10⁷⁹- 10⁸¹ elementary particles in the known universe.

At the other end of the scale, small numbers, look at the zeros in this number:

0.000 000 001 metre - called a nanometre (10^-9 m)

nanotechnology deals with scales of this magnitude

So ends our little excursion into the world of zero. I'll have more to interest and enthrall you next time.

bye for now,

GCSE Maths Tutor