I realized this at the start of Superbowl this evening, but this has got nothing to do with football :-) Well, it's not a riddle, I was amazed at the invention of zero. The connection is quite subtle though, Arnab and I were trying to decipher what XLVI stands for. I am thinking of creating an app that would convert Roman numerals to decimal and vice versa.
Imagine a world without decimal numbers! In "One, two, three to infinity" Gamow says of writing 8732 in Roman numerals and in Egyptian numerals. Can you think of doing even the simplest calculations in that way? The Roman general pictured in Gamow's masterpiece was told to write one million and he had hardly been able to write a hundred thousand with those countless M's. (M = 1000 in Roman). What a plight for that poor soul who didn't know about the existence of zero!
It is hard to imagine a world without zero, but it's even harder to think of what zero is. It is a symbol to mean absence, null. Sitting right or left of any digit, it makes hell and heaven difference, so huge is its power! And yet, by itself, it is NOTHING!
Gazing towards the last rays of the golden sun streaming in through some clouds, I am trying to imagine of the vastness and yet the non-existance of zero. The symbol that is undefined, the symbol that has pushed us humans a long way in the scientific world.... that is the power of nothing!!
Imagine a world without decimal numbers! In "One, two, three to infinity" Gamow says of writing 8732 in Roman numerals and in Egyptian numerals. Can you think of doing even the simplest calculations in that way? The Roman general pictured in Gamow's masterpiece was told to write one million and he had hardly been able to write a hundred thousand with those countless M's. (M = 1000 in Roman). What a plight for that poor soul who didn't know about the existence of zero!
It is hard to imagine a world without zero, but it's even harder to think of what zero is. It is a symbol to mean absence, null. Sitting right or left of any digit, it makes hell and heaven difference, so huge is its power! And yet, by itself, it is NOTHING!
Gazing towards the last rays of the golden sun streaming in through some clouds, I am trying to imagine of the vastness and yet the non-existance of zero. The symbol that is undefined, the symbol that has pushed us humans a long way in the scientific world.... that is the power of nothing!!
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