Why is ZERO called ZERO?

Question

Get deep man, I mean really, Let's get deep.

ZERO is as ZERO does, or what?

Answer 1

I would tell you. But that would be a violation of my contract.

Not really. I was given the nickname in my freshman year of high school. one of my friends said that it reflected my popularity but contradicted my personality. Everyone I know still calls me ZERO. Some of my friends don't even know my real name. It's David. In case you were wondering.

Oh wait.... This is in Physics. Lol.

Answer 2

Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero and former professor of mathematics at Harvard University, provides this answer:

The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. There, a slanted double wedge was inserted between cuneiform symbols for numbers, written positionally, to indicate the absence of a number in a place (as we would write 102, the '0' indicating no digit in the tens column).


zero timeline
TIMELINE shows the development of zero throughout the world. The first recorded zero appeared in Mesopotamia around 3 B.C. The Mayans invented it independently circa 4 A.D. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth. Zero reached western Europe in the 12th century.

Writing Numbers

The Babylonians displayed zero with two angled wedges

The Mayans used an eyelike character to denote zero

The Chinese started writing the open circle we now use for zero


The Hindus depicted zero as a dot

The symbol changed over time as positional notation (for which zero was crucial), made its way to the Babylonian empire and from there to India, via the Greeks (in whose own culture zero made a late and only occasional appearance; the Romans had no trace of it at all). Arab merchants brought the zero they found in India to the West. After many adventures and much opposition, the symbol we use was accepted and the concept flourished, as zero took on much more than a positional meaning. Since then, it has played avital role in mathematizing the world.

The mathematical zero and the philosophical notion of nothingness are related but are not the same. Nothingness plays a central role very early on in Indian thought (there called sunya), and we find speculation in virtually all cosmogonical myths about what must have preceded the world's creation. So in the Bible's book of Genesis (1:2): "And the earth was without form, and void."

But our inability to conceive of such a void is well captured in the book of Job, who cannot reply when God asks him (Job 38:4): "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding." Our own era's physical theories about the big bang cannot quite reach back to an ultimate beginning from nothing--although in mathematics we can generate all numbers from the empty set. Nothingness as the state out of which alone we can freely make our own natures lies at the heart of existentialism, which flourished in the mid-20th century.

Answer 3

zero
1604, from It. zero, from M.L. zephirum, from Arabic sifr "cipher," translation of Skt. sunya-m "empty place, desert, naught" (see cipher). A brief history of the invention of "zero" can be found here. Meaning "worthless person" is recorded from 1813. The verb zero in is 1944, from the noun, on the notion of instrument adjustments. Zero tolerance first recorded 1972, originally U.S. political language.

Answer 4

It's from the Arabic sifr, which means "nothing." 0 was an abstraction introduced at the end of the dark ages and beginning of the Renaissance to European scholars. This, like most of algebra, was learned from the middle east. Hence, the origin of the words are traced from medieval Latin, and from there back to Arabic.

Answer 5

It needed a name right? Just like one had a name so does zero.

Answer 6

"The word "zero" came via French zéro from Venetian language zero, which (together with "cipher") came via Italian zefiro from Arabic صفر, şafira = "it was empty", şifr = "zero", "nothing", which was used to translate Sanskrit śūnya, meaning void or empty."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_%28number%29

Answer 7

Simple, Convention.

Everyone else calls it zero, so we do too.