[NBLUG/talk] The Romans' ban on zero

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 11:15:10AM -0700, mrp wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 10:40:48AM -0700, Steve Zimmerman wrote:
> > Eric Eisenhart once astutely remarked that the Romans
> > banned the numeral "0".  Could this ban have some
> > relation to the modern-day mathematical ban on
> > division by zero?
> 
> The Romans didn't "ban" the numeral 0 any more than they banned cell
> phones.  The numeral 0 didn't exist in the roman world.  The arabic
> numbering system wasn't is use in europe and wouldn't be for many hundreds
> of years after the fall of the Roman empire. (About 1200 A.D. I think)

You're mostly correct.  Also, Steve is referring to a rather silly comment
I'd made.

There's "banning zero" (which is ambiguous) and there's "banning the numeral
0" vs. "banning the number zero", which are totally different things.

Zero in our current mathematical system has 2 primary purposes:
As "0" it denotes a precise lack. (nothing quantified)
In 12034 it sets place so that you can tell 12034 apart from 1234.

Babylonians had a way of denoting the second thing from around 1700BC.  No,
it wasn't a circle and it wasn't used to denote the number zero.  And they
didn't do the equivelant of 12340; somehow that was figured out from
context.

It wasn't in use in the Roman Empire proper, but it was in use on their
docks by traders from elsewhere, as were a wide variety of languages and
counting systems.

I can't find the reference now, but from my recollection, the Romans did
attempt to ban its use on the docks due to the competetive disadvantage
Roman traders had compared to users of a place-based counting system.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Vice-President Pro Tempore
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244