Tuesday, October 27. 2009
Another Victory of the Void?
I was thinking about the zero today. The zero, plain and simply also known as "O", is actually a very important figure. It was so important that the Arabs of the olden days who had taken over the other figures, 1 to 9, from the Indians (saree, of course), just by adding the zero, brought a revolution to calculating.
Nothing would be possible without the zero the way we do it today. Imagine dividing or multiplying if we were still using Roman numbers! And we certainly wouldn't have computers, the zero being one of the two essentials of the binary system. And if you need proof that the Arabs were behind it, you just need to realize that, no matter how we read or name numbers in different languages, we all write them from right to left. You don't believe me? You never write your numbers from right to left? Oh, yes, you do. At the very right, you start with units, and go further left for tens, hundreds, thousands - get the picture? And there is another proof for the Arab origin of the zero; we call figures also cypher or cipher, which relates to "sifr" in Arabic, and even today "sifr" translates as zero.
Now I have observed something even more curious about the zero, and it came up with the beginning of the so called naughties. Literally all of us (or should we say: numerally?) seemed to be irritated by abbreviating the year completely. Instead of writing '1, '5 or '9, we kept writing '01, '05 or '09 - just as if the zero would add importance to those years. And it did, obviously, as the term naughties proves, which is of course related to the zero, too.
I wonder, now that we will soon leave the first decade of this century, will we be in need of another zero? Or will the 1 be sufficient that will rule the following decade at the tens' position? Will we be able to train ourselves to write f.e. nothing but '10, '11, '12?
Nothing would be possible without the zero the way we do it today. Imagine dividing or multiplying if we were still using Roman numbers! And we certainly wouldn't have computers, the zero being one of the two essentials of the binary system. And if you need proof that the Arabs were behind it, you just need to realize that, no matter how we read or name numbers in different languages, we all write them from right to left. You don't believe me? You never write your numbers from right to left? Oh, yes, you do. At the very right, you start with units, and go further left for tens, hundreds, thousands - get the picture? And there is another proof for the Arab origin of the zero; we call figures also cypher or cipher, which relates to "sifr" in Arabic, and even today "sifr" translates as zero.
Now I have observed something even more curious about the zero, and it came up with the beginning of the so called naughties. Literally all of us (or should we say: numerally?) seemed to be irritated by abbreviating the year completely. Instead of writing '1, '5 or '9, we kept writing '01, '05 or '09 - just as if the zero would add importance to those years. And it did, obviously, as the term naughties proves, which is of course related to the zero, too.
I wonder, now that we will soon leave the first decade of this century, will we be in need of another zero? Or will the 1 be sufficient that will rule the following decade at the tens' position? Will we be able to train ourselves to write f.e. nothing but '10, '11, '12?
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