Kolkata, West Bengal
The first time I encountered the concept of "zero" was in the earliest grades of school. Counting one, two, three, and four, I eventually reached ten—and there, I came across zero for the first time. Before I started formal education, I would still count up to ten, but I never had to write it down, so zero remained unseen.
The moment I encountered it, I was introduced to the idea of "ten"—one followed by zero. Would it not have been possible to write ten without zero? Of course, it could have been! Just as one to nine are represented by unique symbols, ten could have been represented by a different symbol. Ancient civilizations did just that. For example, the Romans used the symbol "X" to denote ten. This "X" had no resemblance to their symbol for one, "I." Similarly, the Mayans used two parallel lines ("=") to signify ten, which also bore no similarity to their single dot symbol for one.
The challenges posed by these systems had to be accepted to carry out necessary tasks. Now, why are we discussing ten so extensively? Here's why: several ancient civilizations developed counting systems based on the number ten. This can be attributed to the natural use of our ten fingers for basic counting.
Imagine a shepherd keeping track of his livestock. He might assign one finger to each animal. Once all ten fingers were used, he might tie a pebble to the corner of his garment. Then, he would start over, assigning one finger for each new animal. If he had fourteen animals, he might have one pebble tied to his garment and four fingers marked. We call this "fourteen," which is essentially "ten and four."
Now, when the shepherd accumulates ten pebbles, he could replace them with one larger pebble, signifying "one hundred." That single larger pebble is equivalent to what we call a hundred today.
After the invention of scripts, symbols were used to record numbers such as one, ten, and one hundred. Interestingly, not all civilizations based their numbering systems on ten. Over time, some insightful minds in India introduced a revolutionary method of writing numbers. Using only the digits from one to nine, they devised a system to represent all numbers.
They created columns moving from right to left, naming them units, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on. The value of a number depended on the column it occupied. For instance, the digit 4 in the tens column meant forty, whereas in the hundreds column, it represented four hundred.
This system was named the Decimal Positional Notation System. To write one hundred, it was enough to place the digit "1" in the hundreds column. There was no need for an additional symbol. However, to indicate that "1" was in the hundreds column, they created placeholders for the tens and units columns. Initially, a dot was used in these placeholders, known as the "zero dot." Over time, this evolved into the "circle" we recognize today as the symbol for zero.
When this discovery traveled from India to other civilizations, they integrated the concept of zero with their existing number systems. As a result, while the symbols for one to nine differ across languages, the symbol for zero remains universal.
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