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Archives For March 14, 2013
Who Invented Zero?
Jessie Szalay, LiveScience Contributor
All I want to know is: If nothing was never discovered would nothing exist? – Nae
Date: 12 March 2013
Though humans have always understood the concept of nothing or having nothing, the concept of zero is relatively new — it only fully developed in the fifth century A.D. Before then, mathematicians struggled to perform the simplest arithmetic calculations. Today, zero — both as a symbol (or numeral) and a concept meaning the absence of any quantity — allows us to perform calculus, do complicated equations, and to have invented computers
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Early history: Angled wedges: Zero was invented independently by the Babylonians, Mayans and Indians (although some researchers say the Indian number system was influenced by the Babylonians). The Babylonians got their number system from the Sumerians, the first people in the world to develop a counting system. Developed 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, the Sumerian system was positional — the value of a symbol depended on its position relative to other symbols. Robert Kaplan, author of “The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero,“ suggests that an ancestor to the placeholder zero may have been a pair of angled wedges used to represent an empty number column. However, Charles Seife, author of “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,” disagrees that the wedges represented a placeholder.
The Sumerians’ system passed through the Akkadian Empire to the Babylonians around 300 B.C. There, scholars agree, a symbol appeared that was clearly a placeholder — a way to tell 10 from 100 or to signify that in the number 2,025, there is no number in the hundreds column. Initially, the Babylonians left an empty space in their cuneiform number system, but when that became confusing, they added a symbol — double angled wedges — to represent the empty column. However, they never developed the idea of zero as a number.
Zero in the Americas: Six hundred years later and 12,000 miles from Babylon, the Mayans developed zero as a placeholder around A.D. 350 and used it to denote a placeholder in their elaborate calendar systems. Despite being highly skilled mathematicians, the Mayans never used zero in equations, however. Kaplan describes the Mayan invention of zero as the “most striking example of the zero being devised wholly from scratch.”
India: Where zero became a number: Some scholars assert that the Babylonian concept wove its way down to India, but others give the Indians credit for developing zero independently.
The concept of zero first appeared in India around A.D. 458. Mathematical equations were spelled out or spoken in poetry or chants rather than symbols. Different words symbolized zero, or nothing, such as “void,” “sky” or “space.” In 628, a Hindu astronomer and mathematician named Brahmagupta developed a symbol for zero — a dot underneath numbers. He also developed mathematical operations using zero, wrote rules for reaching zero through addition and subtraction, and the results of using zero in equations. This was the first time in the world that zero was recognized as a number of its own, as both an idea and a symbol.
From the Middle East to Wall Street: Over the next few centuries, the concept of zero caught on in China and the Middle East. According to Nils-Bertil Wallin of Yale Global, by A.D. 773, zero reached Baghdad where it became part of the Arabic number system, which is based upon the Indian system.
A Persian mathematician, Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi, suggested that a little circle should be used in calculations if no number appeared in the tens place. The Arabs called this circle “sifr,” or “empty.” Zero was crucial to al-Khowarizmi, who used it to invent algebra in the ninth century. Al-Khowarizmi also developed quick methods for multiplying and dividing numbers, which are known as algorithms — a corruption of his name.
Zero found its way to Europe through the Moorish conquest of Spain and was further developed by Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who used it to do equations without an abacus, then the most prevalent tool for doing arithmetic. This development was highly popular among merchants, who used Fibonacci’s equations involving zero to balance their books.
Wallin points out that the Italian government was suspicious of Arabic numbers and outlawed the use of zero. Merchants continued to use it illegally and secretively, and the Arabic word for zero, “sifr,” brought about the word “cipher,” which not only means a numeric character, but also came to mean “code.” By the 1600s, zero was used fairly widely throughout Europe. It was fundamental in Rene Descartes’ Cartesian coordinate system and in Sir Isaac Newton’s and Gottfried Wilhem Liebniz’s developments of calculus. Calculus paved the way for physics, engineering, computers, and much of financial and economic theory.
Early Human Ancestor Surprisingly Smart
Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 12 March 2013 Early human ancestors needed high-level intelligence to use fire, new research suggests. The study, published in February in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, argues that fire use requires long-term planning, group cooperation and inhibition. In combination with evidence for early fire use, the study suggests that the early human ancestor Homo erectus may have been smarter than previously thought. “Early humans would have had to have been fairly clever to keep a fire going by cooperating, not stealing food or not stealing fire from other people,” said study author Terrence Twomey, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
, published in February in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, argues that fire use requires long-term planning, group cooperation and inhibition. In combination with evidence for early fire use, the study suggests that the early human ancestor Homo erectus may have been smarter than previously thought. “Early humans would have had to have been fairly clever to keep a fire going by cooperating, not stealing food or not stealing fire from other people,” said study author Terrence Twomey, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Fire found: Traces of ash found in Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa suggest that at least some Homo erectus used fire as far back as 1 million years ago. Another site in Israel, Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, shows evidence of fire from around 800,000 years ago. While it’s possible these ancient ancestors made fire from scratch, it’s more likely they learned to harness flames from a lightning strike or other natural source, Twomey told LiveScience. [Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning]Some anthropologists have suggested that cooked food allowed early human ancestors to eat meat, derive more nutrition from food and neutralize bacteria in their food. As a result, early humans could divert energy from digestion to brain growth.But the evidence for that hypothesis is mostly circumstantial.
Fire smarts: Twomey decided to look at the question from another angle — what minimum mental abilities would human ancestors need to regularly maintain fire? Quite a lot, it turns out. Lacking the ability to make fire from scratch, to keep fires going, Homo erectus needed long-range planning abilities far and above those needed for fashioning primitive stone tools or hunting prey. They would need to gather firewood several days before the fire might die, or anticipate gathering storms and protect fragile flames.Using fire also requires the self-control to avoid eating food until it’s cooked, a testchimpanzees would fail abysmally.What’s more, human ancestors would need fairly advanced social skills to make sure others didn’t steal cooked food or a fire while its original tender was out gathering firewood, Twomey said.”It’s not simply a matter of keeping a fire going by tossing some sticks on it,” Twomey told LiveScience.As a result, if Homo erectus tended fires 1 million years ago, it would suggest the early human ancestors were smarter than previously thought, he said.
Test of intelligence: The new research paper lays out a framework for experimentally testing the minimalcognitive abilities that our ancestors would have needed to keep fires, said Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University and the author of “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” (Basic Books, 2010), who was not involved in the study. Still, the study doesn’t prove that human ancestors possessed those abilities 1 million years ago, said Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the study.”You’ve got to be smarter than an ape to domesticate and use fire, there’s no question about it,” Tattersall told LiveScience. “But we don’t really know when the use of fire became a routine part of hominid life.”
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