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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (70081)	6/1/2008 5:14:17 PM
From: spiral3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541072

I like it too, for all sorts of reasons. The maths is very interesting, thank you. I never knew that, but guess what. Zero was introduced initially, not as a number to be used in computation, but as a position marker to distinguish between such numbers as 123, 1203, 1230, and 1023. The Maya, about the 1st century ad, used a small oval containing an inner arc to denote zero. About five centuries later the Hindus began to use a circle or a dot as a symbol for zero; the dot later fell into disuse. These Indian mathematicians wrote numbers in columns, and they used the zero to represent a blank column. The Hindu word for zero was sunya, meaning empty, or void; this word, translated and transliterated by the Arabs as sifr, is the root of the English words cipher and zero answers.yahoo.com