How the human brain contends with the strangeness of zero
Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born. Hundreds of years later, in seventh-century India, zero took on a new identity. No longer a placeholder, the digit acquired a value and found its place on the number line, before 1. Its invention…