What are the Details about the history of number zero?

Answer 1

There are two different things to consider:

(*) a place-holder for an empty column in a positional number system

(*) zero as a number in its own right.

Our number system is positional, so in the number 33, the first 3 means three lots of ten, and the second 3 means three units. If we didn't have 0, we would have trouble distinguishing between thirty-three and three hundred and three. We could write three hundred and three like this:

3 3 , leaving a space for the tens column.

This is prone to mistakes, so we could instead write three hundred and three like this:

3*3 , using * to indicate that the tens column is empty.

Something like using space and * as place-holders was done by the Babylonians about 3500 years ago. This is not the same thing as treating 0 (zero) as a number in its own right. That seems to have been first done by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta, in 628 AD.