0


0 is a number, and the numerical digit used to represent that number in numerals. It fulfills a central role in mathematics as the additive identity of the integers, real numbers, and many other algebraic structures. As a digit, 0 is used as a placeholder in place value systems. Names for the number 0 in English include zero, nought, naught , nil, or—in contexts where at least one adjacent digit distinguishes it from the letter "O"—oh or o. Informal or slang terms for zero include zilch and zip.
Ought and aught, as well as cipher, have also been used historically.

Etymology

The word zero came into the English language via French zéro from Italian zero, Italian contraction of Venetian zevero form of Italian zefiro via ṣafira or ṣifr. In pre-Islamic time the word ṣifr had the meaning "empty". Sifr evolved to mean zero when it was used to translate śūnya from India. The first known English use of zero was in 1598.
The Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who grew up in North Africa and is credited with introducing the decimal system to Europe, used the term zephyrum. This became zefiro in Italian, and was then contracted to zero in Venetian. The Italian word Wikt:zefiro was already in existence and may have influenced the spelling when transcribing Arabic ṣifr.

Modern usage

There are different words used for the number or concept of zero depending on the context. For the simple notion of lacking, the words nothing and none are often used. Sometimes the words nought, naught and aught are used. Several sports have specific words for a score of zero, such as love in tennis and duck in cricket; nil is used for many sports in British English. It is often called oh in the context of telephone numbers. Slang words for zero include zip, zilch, nada, and scratch. Duck egg and goose egg are also slang for zero.

History

Ancient Near East

Ancient Egyptian numerals were base 10. They used hieroglyphs for the digits and were not positional. By 1770 BC, the Egyptians had a symbol for zero in accounting texts. The symbol nfr, meaning beautiful, was also used to indicate the base level in drawings of tombs and pyramids and distances were measured relative to the base line as being above or below this line.
By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. By 300 BC, a punctuation symbol was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In a tablet unearthed at Kish, the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges.
The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not used alone. Nor was it used at the end of a number. Thus numbers like 2 and 120, 3 and 180, 4 and 240, looked the same because the larger numbers lacked a final sexagesimal placeholder. Only context could differentiate them.

Pre-Columbian Americas

The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar developed in south-central Mexico and Central America required the use of zero as a place-holder within its vigesimal positional numeral system. Many different glyphs, including this partial quatrefoil——were used as a zero symbol for these Long Count dates, the earliest of which has a date of 36 BC.
Since the eight earliest Long Count dates appear outside the Maya homeland, it is generally believed that the use of zero in the Americas predated the Maya and was possibly the invention of the Olmecs. Many of the earliest Long Count dates were found within the Olmec heartland, although the Olmec civilization ended by the, several centuries before the earliest known Long Count dates.
Although zero became an integral part of Maya numerals, with a different, empty tortoise-like "shell shape" used for many depictions of the "zero" numeral, it is assumed to have not influenced Old World numeral systems.
Quipu, a knotted cord device, used in the Inca Empire and its predecessor societies in the Andean region to record accounting and other digital data, is encoded in a base ten positional system. Zero is represented by the absence of a knot in the appropriate position.

Classical antiquity

The ancient Greeks had no symbol for zero, and did not use a digit placeholder for it. They seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?", leading to philosophical and, by the medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero.
By AD 150, Ptolemy, influenced by Hipparchus and the Babylonians, was using a symbol for zero in his work on mathematical astronomy called the Syntaxis Mathematica, also known as the Almagest. This Hellenistic zero was perhaps the earliest documented use of a numeral representing zero in the Old World. Ptolemy used it many times in his Almagest for the magnitude of solar and lunar eclipses. It represented the value of both digits and minutes of immersion at first and last contact. Digits varied continuously from as the Moon passed over the Sun, where twelve digits was the angular diameter of the Sun. Minutes of immersion was tabulated from where 0′0″ used the symbol as a place holder in two positions of his sexagesimal positional numeral system, while the combination meant a zero angle. Minutes of immersion was also a continuous function , where d was the digit function and 31′20″ was the sum of the radii of the Sun's and Moon's discs. Ptolemy's symbol was a place holder as well as a number used by two continuous mathematical functions, one within another, so it meant zero, not none.
The earliest use of zero in the calculation of the Julian Easter occurred before AD311 at the first entry in a table of epacts as preserved in an Ethiopic document for the years AD311 to 369 using a Ge'ez word for "none" alongside Ge'ez numerals, which was translated from an equivalent table published by the Church of Alexandria in Medieval Greek. This use was repeated in AD525 in an equivalent table that was translated via the Latin nulla or "none" by Dionysius Exiguus, alongside Roman numerals. When division produced zero as a remainder, nihil, meaning "nothing", was used. These medieval zeros were used by all future medieval calculators of Easter. The initial "N" was used as a zero symbol in a table of Roman numerals by Bede or his colleagues around AD 725.

China

The Sūnzĭ Suànjīng, of unknown date but estimated to be dated from the 1st to, and Japanese records dated from the 18th century, describe how the Chinese counting rods system enables one to perform decimal calculations. As noted in Xiahou Yang’s Suanjing that states to multiply or divide a number by 10, 100, 1000, or 10000 all one needs to do, with rods on the counting board, is to move them forwards, or back, by 1, 2, 3, or 4 places, According to A History of Mathematics, the rods "gave the decimal representation of a number, with an empty space denoting zero." The counting rod system is considered a positional notation system.
In AD 690, Empress Wǔ promulgated Zetian characters, one of which was "〇". The symbol 0 for denoting zero is a variation of this character.
Zero was not treated as a number at that time, but as a "vacant position". Qín Jiǔsháo's 1247 Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections is the oldest surviving Chinese mathematical text using a round symbol for zero. Chinese authors had been familiar with the idea of negative numbers by the Han Dynasty, as seen in The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art.

India

, a Sanskrit prosody scholar, used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables, a notation similar to Morse code. Pingala used the Sanskrit word śūnya explicitly to refer to zero.
It was considered that the earliest text to use a decimal place-value system, including a zero, is the Lokavibhāga, a Jain text on cosmology surviving in a medieval Sanskrit translation of the Prakrit original, which is internally dated to AD 458. In this text, śūnya is also used to refer to zero.
A symbol for zero, a large dot likely to be the precursor of the still-current hollow symbol, is used throughout the Bakhshali manuscript, a practical manual on arithmetic for merchants. In 2017 three samples from the manuscript were shown by radiocarbon dating to come from three different centuries: from AD 224–383, AD 680–779, and AD 885–993, making it the world's oldest recorded use of the zero symbol. It is not known how the birch bark fragments from different centuries that form the manuscript came to be packaged together.
The origin of the modern decimal-based place value notation can be traced to the Aryabhatiya, which states sthānāt sthānaṁ daśaguṇaṁ syāt "from place to place each is ten times the preceding." The concept of zero as a digit in the decimal place value notation was developed in India, presumably as early as during the Gupta period, with the oldest unambiguous evidence dating to the 7th century.
The rules governing the use of zero appeared for the first time in Brahmagupta's Brahmasputha Siddhanta. This work considers not only zero, but also negative numbers and the algebraic rules for the elementary operations of arithmetic with such numbers. In some instances, his rules differ from the modern standard, specifically the definition of the value of zero divided by zero as zero.

Epigraphy

There are numerous copper plate inscriptions, with the same small o in them, some of them possibly dated to the 6th century, but their date or authenticity may be open to doubt.
A stone tablet found in the ruins of a temple near Sambor on the Mekong, Kratié Province, Cambodia, includes the inscription of "605" in Khmer numerals. The number is the year of the inscription in the Saka era, corresponding to a date of AD 683.
The first known use of special glyphs for the decimal digits that includes the indubitable appearance of a symbol for the digit zero, a small circle, appears on a stone inscription found at the Chaturbhuj Temple, Gwalior, in India, dated 876. Zero is also used as a placeholder in the Bakhshali manuscript, portions of which date from AD 224–383.

Middle Ages

Transmission to Islamic culture

The Arabic-language inheritance of science was largely Greek, followed by Hindu influences. In 773, at Al-Mansur's behest, translations were made of many ancient treatises including Greek, Roman, Indian, and others.
In AD 813, astronomical tables were prepared by a Persian mathematician, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, using Hindu numerals; and about 825, he published a book synthesizing Greek and Hindu knowledge and also contained his own contribution to mathematics including an explanation of the use of zero. This book was later translated into Latin in the 12th century under the title Algoritmi de numero Indorum. This title means "al-Khwarizmi on the Numerals of the Indians". The word "Algoritmi" was the translator's Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi's name, and the word "Algorithm" or "Algorism" started meaning any arithmetic based on decimals.
Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi, in 976, stated that if no number appears in the place of tens in a calculation, a little circle should be used "to keep the rows". This circle was called ṣifr.

Transmission to Europe

The Hindu–Arabic numeral system reached Europe in the 11th century, via Al-Andalus through Spanish Muslims, the Moors, together with knowledge of astronomy and instruments like the astrolabe, first imported by Gerbert of Aurillac. For this reason, the numerals came to be known in Europe as "Arabic numerals". The Italian mathematician Fibonacci or Leonardo of Pisa was instrumental in bringing the system into European mathematics in 1202, stating:
After my father's appointment by his homeland as state official in the customs house of Bugia for the Pisan merchants who thronged to it, he took charge; and in view of its future usefulness and convenience, had me in my boyhood come to him and there wanted me to devote myself to and be instructed in the study of calculation for some days. There, following my introduction, as a consequence of marvelous instruction in the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the knowledge of the art very much appealed to me before all others, and for it I realized that all its aspects were studied in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence, with their varying methods; and at these places thereafter, while on business. I pursued my study in depth and learned the give-and-take of disputation. But all this even, and the algorism, as well as the art of Pythagoras, I considered as almost a mistake in respect to the method of the Hindus. Therefore, embracing more stringently that method of the Hindus, and taking stricter pains in its study, while adding certain things from my own understanding and inserting also certain things from the niceties of Euclid's geometric art. I have striven to compose this book in its entirety as understandably as I could, dividing it into fifteen chapters. Almost everything which I have introduced I have displayed with exact proof, in order that those further seeking this knowledge, with its pre-eminent method, might be instructed, and further, in order that the Latin people might not be discovered to be without it, as they have been up to now. If I have perchance omitted anything more or less proper or necessary, I beg indulgence, since there is no one who is blameless and utterly provident in all things. The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 ... any number may be written.

Here Leonardo of Pisa uses the phrase "sign 0", indicating it is like a sign to do operations like addition or multiplication. From the 13th century, manuals on calculation became common in Europe where they were called algorismus after the Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī. The most popular was written by Johannes de Sacrobosco, about 1235 and was one of the earliest scientific books to be printed in 1488. Until the late 15th century, Hindu–Arabic numerals seem to have predominated among mathematicians, while merchants preferred to use the Roman numerals. In the 16th century, they became commonly used in Europe.

Mathematics

0 is the integer immediately preceding 1. Zero is an even number because it is divisible by 2 with no remainder. 0 is neither positive nor negative. Many definitions include 0 as a natural number, and then the only natural number not to be positive. Zero is a number which quantifies a count or an amount of null size. In most cultures, 0 was identified before the idea of negative things, or quantities less than zero, was accepted.
The value, or number, zero is not the same as the digit zero, used in numeral systems using positional notation. Successive positions of digits have higher weights, so inside a numeral the digit zero is used to skip a position and give appropriate weights to the preceding and following digits. A zero digit is not always necessary in a positional number system, for example, in the number 02. In some instances, a leading zero may be used to distinguish a number.

Elementary algebra

The number 0 is the smallest non-negative integer. The natural number following 0 is 1 and no natural number precedes 0. The number 0 may or may not be considered a natural number, but it is an integer, and hence a rational number and a real number.
The number 0 is neither positive nor negative and is usually displayed as the central number in a number line. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It cannot be prime because it has an infinite number of factors, and cannot be composite because it cannot be expressed as a product of prime numbers. Zero is, however, even.
The following are some basic rules for dealing with the number 0. These rules apply for any real or complex number x, unless otherwise stated.
The expression, which may be obtained in an attempt to determine the limit of an expression of the form as a result of applying the lim operator independently to both operands of the fraction, is a so-called "indeterminate form". That does not simply mean that the limit sought is necessarily undefined; rather, it means that the limit of, if it exists, must be found by another method, such as l'Hôpital's rule.
The sum of 0 numbers is 0, and the product of 0 numbers is 1. The factorial 0! evaluates to 1, as a special case of the empty product.

Other branches of mathematics

The value zero plays a special role for many physical quantities. For some quantities, the zero level is naturally distinguished from all other levels, whereas for others it is more or less arbitrarily chosen. For example, for an absolute temperature, zero is the lowest possible value. This is in contrast to for example temperatures on the Celsius scale, where zero is arbitrarily defined to be at the freezing point of water. Measuring sound intensity in decibels or phons, the zero level is arbitrarily set at a reference value—for example, at a value for the threshold of hearing. In physics, the zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may possess and is the energy of the ground state of the system.

Chemistry

Zero has been proposed as the atomic number of the theoretical element tetraneutron. It has been shown that a cluster of four neutrons may be stable enough to be considered an atom in its own right. This would create an element with no protons and no charge on its nucleus.
As early as 1926, Andreas von Antropoff coined the term neutronium for a conjectured form of matter made up of neutrons with no protons, which he placed as the chemical element of atomic number zero at the head of his new version of the periodic table. It was subsequently placed as a noble gas in the middle of several spiral representations of the periodic system for classifying the chemical elements.

Computer science

The most common practice throughout human history has been to start counting at one, and this is the practice in early classic computer programming languages such as Fortran and COBOL. However, in the late 1950s LISP introduced zero-based numbering for arrays while Algol 58 introduced completely flexible basing for array subscripts, and most subsequent programming languages adopted one or other of these positions. For example, the elements of an array are numbered starting from 0 in C, so that for an array of n items the sequence of array indices runs from 0 to. This permits an array element's location to be calculated by adding the index directly to address of the array, whereas 1-based languages precalculate the array's base address to be the position one element before the first.
There can be confusion between 0- and 1-based indexing, for example Java's JDBC indexes parameters from 1 although Java itself uses 0-based indexing.
In databases, it is possible for a field not to have a value. It is then said to have a null value. For numeric fields it is not the value zero. For text fields this is not blank nor the empty string. The presence of null values leads to three-valued logic. No longer is a condition either true or false, but it can be undetermined. Any computation including a null value delivers a null result.
A null pointer is a pointer in a computer program that does not point to any object or function. In C, the integer constant 0 is converted into the null pointer at compile time when it appears in a pointer context, and so 0 is a standard way to refer to the null pointer in code. However, the internal representation of the null pointer may be any bit pattern.
In mathematics both −0 and +0 represent exactly the same number, i.e., there is no "positive zero" or "negative zero" distinct from zero. However, in some computer hardware signed number representations, zero has two distinct representations, a positive one grouped with the positive numbers and a negative one grouped with the negatives; this kind of dual representation is known as signed zero, with the latter form sometimes called negative zero. These representations include the signed magnitude and one's complement binary integer representations, and most floating point number representations.
In binary, 0 represents the value for "off", which means no electricity flow.
Zero is the value of false in many programming languages.
The Unix epoch begins the midnight before the first of January 1970.
The MacOS epoch and Palm OS epoch begins the midnight before the first of January 1904.
Many APIs and operating systems that require applications to return an integer value as an exit status typically use zero to indicate success and non-zero values to indicate specific error or warning conditions.

Other fields

The modern numerical digit 0 is usually written as a circle or ellipse. Traditionally, many print typefaces made the capital letter O more rounded than the narrower, elliptical digit 0. Typewriters originally made no distinction in shape between O and 0; some models did not even have a separate key for the digit 0. The distinction came into prominence on modern character displays.
A slashed zero can be used to distinguish the number from the letter. The digit 0 with a dot in the center seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 displays and has continued with some modern computer typefaces such as Andalé Mono, and in some airline reservation systems. One variation uses a short vertical bar instead of the dot. Some fonts designed for use with computers made one of the capital-O–digit-0 pair more rounded and the other more angular. A further distinction is made in falsification-hindering typeface as used on German car number plates by slitting open the digit 0 on the upper right side. Sometimes the digit 0 is used either exclusively, or not at all, to avoid confusion altogether.

Year label

In the BC calendar era, the year 1 BC is the first year before AD 1; there is not a year zero. By contrast, in astronomical year numbering, the year 1 BC is numbered 0, the year 2 BC is numbered −1, and so on.