WHO INVENTED ?
Zero was invented independently by the Babylonians, Mayans and Indians
(although some researchers say the Indian number system was influenced
by the Babylonians). The Babylonians got their number system from the
Sumerians, the first people in the world to develop a counting system.
Developed 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, the Sumerian system was positional —
the value of a symbol depended on its position relative to other
symbols. Robert Kaplan, author of "The Nothing That Is: A Natural
History of Zero," suggests that an ancestor to the placeholder
zero may have been a pair of angled wedges used to represent an empty
number column. However, Charles Seife, author of "Zero: The Biography of
a Dangerous Idea," disagrees that the wedges represented a placeholder.
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