Origin Of Zero
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ast a century before, depending on sources consulted; in fact, there are some scholars who refer to a manuscript dating approximately from the second century B.C.E. that uses the number zero in the computation of the number of arrangements of two different items in an unknown number of places (Datta 75).
Regardless of the exact date of the origination of the zero, it can be said that until the Indian number system, along with their symbol for zero, was imported into Baghdad in the middle of the ninth century, Indian mathematicians stood alone in the world as they developed an increasing number of methods for various computations and applications using the number zero in one way or another. In fact, all known Hindu treatises on arithmetic and algebra contained a section entirely devoted to basic mathematical operations involving the number zero (Datta 80). Earlier manuscripts show the zero being used to represent placeholders in numbers such as one million, while later ...