Grade 12 · History
The History of Zero
Of all the digits in common use, zero is the youngest, and for most of history it did not seem to be a number at all. Roman engineers built aqueducts and Roman merchants kept careful accounts without any numeral for zero, because their system of letters had no need to record an empty quantity. The history of zero is the history of how an absence became first a mark, then a number, and finally one of the most powerful ideas in mathematics.
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