The definition of zero
Zero is unique among numbers. The concept was present in ancient Egypt, and traces of it were found in ancient Babylon as a placeholder in their number system, but it wasn’t treated as a true number at that point.
The ancient Greeks have had some resentment towards it because, regardless that they knew its importance, initially, due to some philosophical constraints, they didn’t use it as a proper number, because not, to be or not to be, but how can nothing be, that was the question in the ancient Agora.
The breakthrough came in India around the 5th century CE when mathematician Brahmagupta defined zero as a number and established rules for its arithmetic use. This concept spread to the Islamic world, notably through the works of Al-Khwarizmi, and then to Europe, where Fibonacci played a key role in its adoption in the 12th century. Thank you, Wikipedia.
Zero has several important properties: it is the additive identity, meaning adding...
