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What is zero

 0 (zero) 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 structure . As a digit, 0 is used as a placeholder in place value systems .  Names for the number 0 in  English include zeronought (UK), 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.

what is zero


The word zero came into the English language via French zéro from the Italian zero, a contraction of the Venetian zevero form of Italian zefiro via ṣafira or ṣifr. In pre-Islamic time the word ṣifr (Arabic صفر) had the meaning "empty". Sifr evolved to mean zero when it was used to translate śūnya (Sanskrit : शून्य) from India.  The first known English use of zero was in 1598.

The Italian mathematician  Fibonacci  (c. 1170–1250), 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 zefiro  was already in existence (meaning "west wind" from Latin and Greek zephyrus ) and may have influenced the spelling when transcribing Arabic ṣifr.

Modern usage

Depending on the context, there may be different words used for the number zero, or the concept of zero. For the simple notion of lacking, the words "nothing" and "none" are often used. Sometimes, the word "nought" or "naught" is used. It is often called "oh" in the context of telephone numbers. Slang words for zero include "zip", "zilch", "nada", and "scratch."

"Nil" is used for many sports in British English . Several sports have specific words for a score of zero, such as "love " in tennis  – from French l'oeuf, "the egg" – and "duck " in cricket , a shortening of "duck's egg"; "goose egg" is another general slang term used for zero.


India

Pingala  (c. 3rd/2nd century BC), a Sanskrit  prosody  scholar, used binary numbers  in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables), a notation similar to Morse code , Pingala used the Sanskrit  word  shunya explicitly to refer to zero

The concept of zero as a written digit in the decimal place value notation was developed in India , presumably as early as during the Gupta period  (c. 5th century), with the oldest unambiguous evidence dating to the 7th century.

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 radio carbon dating  to come from three different centuries: from AD 224–383, AD 680–779, and AD 885–993, making it South Asia's oldest recorded use of the zero symbol. It is not known how the birch bark fragments from different centuries forming the manuscript came to be packaged together.

The Lokavibhaga , a Jain  text on cosmology  surviving in a medieval Sanskrit translation of the Prakrit  original, which is internally dated to AD 458 (Saka era  380), uses a decimal  place value system , including a zero. In this text, shunya("void, empty") is also used to refer to zero.[43]

The Aryabhatiya  (c. 500), states sthānāt sthānaṁ daśaguṇaṁ syāt "from place to place each is ten times the preceding."

Rules governing the use of zero appeared in Brahmagupta's  Brahmasputha Siddhanta  (7th century), which states the sum of zero with itself as zero, and incorrectly division by zero  as:

A positive or negative number when divided by zero is a fraction with the zero as denominator. Zero divided by a negative or positive number is either zero or is expressed as a fraction with zero as numerator and the finite quantity as denominator. Zero divided by zero is zero.

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