why did the romans not use 0?

Answer 1

The Romans used only seven letters to express all their numbers. The combination of a letter and its position could represent any number. i.e: I, V, X, L, C, D, M

Answer 2

The Romans did not use a zero because they did not need to.Their system was a simple one made up of a series of letters each representing a number: I = 1; V = 5; X = 10; L = 50; C = 100; etc. So any number could be created by arranging these letters starting with the largest; eg. to make 6 we use VI, (ie 5=1) 27 = XXVII (10 +10+5+I=I) and 179 becomes CLXXVIIII ( 100+50+10+10+5+1+1+1+1) etc.
By the way, the Romans always wrote 9 as VIIII not as IX (1 before 10) as found on many clocks. However, they could write 40 as XL (10 before 50) instead of XXXX.
In our decimal system (we count in 10's and multiples of 10) zero (0) is NOT a number. It is what mathematicians call a "placeholder."
So, in decimal, 17 = 1x10 = 7units.
384 = 3x100 + 8x10 = 4units.
and 705 = 7x100 + 0x10 + 5units.
The zero (0) in 705 is just a symbol to show that the tens column is empty, the number 705 contains no tens. It holds the otherwise empty place between the hundreds column and the units column.

Hope this answers your question.

Answer 3

They did use it. They did have a concept of zero and a word for it - nihil, or nil (as in football scores today). They used it in positional notation for calculation, on the abacus, which was in daily use in banks, shops etc. all over the ancient world and was perhaps invented locally, perhaps imported from the East, where it had been in use even longer.

What none of the ancient European civilisations had was the Indian (miscalled Arabic) number system which allows you to do abacus-type calculations on paper. When you look at the price of papyrus in that time, they had little incentive to change to a paper-based system. So numbers were recorded using their traditional Roman numbers (very hard to alter fraudulently, by the way, which is why they survived in commerce in this country until the nineteenth century) but the calculations were done in a surprisingly modern way on the old bead-frame or pebble-frame. The word calculation comes from the Latin for a pebble. The abacus is still used in some countries, because cheaper and much faster than an electronic calculator.

Answer 4

For two reasons.

1) the 0 as we know it is mostly useful in positional ciphering systems, which was not the kind used in ancient Rome

2) Zero as a mathematical concept was not known in Rome. The Greek seem not to have known what to do of the idea either. The idea of using a "no value" like a positive value did not fit with their positive way of thinking.

Zero was apparently developed in India between 500 and 200 BC, but reached Western mathematics only in the 1100s and 1200s, when the extended contacts with arab culture from the crusades brought back the full extent of what the Arabs could bring us.

Answer 5

It may sound strange, but they did not have the concept of the number 0. The number was invented by the Arabs in their mathematical system. Much of our mathematical system comes from the Arabs, not just the fact that we use Arabic numbers.

Answer 6

Nobody used it at that time. It's like asking why they didn't use microwave ovens. It hadn't been created and nobody noticed the absence.