Did you know that there is no Roman numeral for zero? Zero wasn’t even considered until it was put forward by Western mathematics.
Well, I, for one, was aghast. How could they not have zero? What did they call it when they ran out of cookies? Or money? Did they just stop speaking and writing?
So, I looked it up, and I must tell you, the answer was not very satisfying. Experts say their additive system was for the business of pricing and trading goods. What—are you telling me no one ever got cheated and was down to zero? Or had zero goods left to sell?
How could you even have a decimal
system, algebra, or calculus? How could scientists measure anything? How could
computer science even have been invented?
Guess when else you get zero answers? When you search “common uses of zero.” You get a list of grammar sites that describe the Zero Article in English. These are times when we don’t use A, An, or The. And they are super obvious, not worth having a huge explanation. (We don’t use them when we say college, winter, today, midnight, and probably hundreds of other times we omit articles.)
So, not only
was the poor little zero ignored by the Romans, but by today’s entire
computer system as well.
And, for this,
I give both of them a big, fat ZERO.
However, I will give you 100% if you join 10K of
my subscribers, on my Youtube Mom Channel, filled with fabulous, short life hacks.
