Ancient Indian Text Re-Writes History Of Number Zero And Mathematics

This catalog of birch bark info was sitting in a library since 1902 waiting to be studied.



A manuscript that carbon dates to 224-383 AD revealed the oldest example of the use of zero.

The manuscript has now been carbon-dated and the results show we must re-write history of mathematics and the number zero. It was originally thought that manuscript was from the 9th century, but the dating methods revealed that the oldest pages are from somewhere between 224 A.D and 383 AD.

www.ancientpages.com...

This is another example of a found artifact sitting in museums and colleges that have valuable info that was overlooked somehow. These manuscripts were housed in a library since 1902. Lots of information being housed and not studied. Makes me wonder how much info is waiting to be shown-or hidden.

A recent discovery shows history of mathematics should be re-written and the number 0 is much older than previously thought.

In 1881, a local farmer stumbled across an ancient valuable manuscript that been housed by the University of Oxford’s Bodleian library since 1902.

The Bakhshali manuscript, named after the village where is was discovered consists of 70 leaves of birch bark, filled with mathematics and text in the form of Sanskrit.

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I'd love to see the equation just to see it's complexity. The concept of a place holder or a symbol indicating less than one is quite complex I'd love to see it translated to Arabic numbers and the text provided with it.
Was it a bill of sale? An account of wages? Inventory of live stock?
I find this fascinating.

Yep, I'm all about math...I wake up from dreams in the math of it all.....

how cool this is, huh!!

a reply to: Sillyolme

Technically the Arabic numeral's are actually NOT arabic they are Arabic and Hindu.
i.pinimg.com...
upload.wikimedia.org...

And a quick read of this will also enlighten.
www.storyofmathematics.com...

So the human race knew the concept of the numeral Zero a very long time ago indeed and also the decimal place, what this bark therefore illustrates is not that it was known before the Arab's whom actually took most of there knowledge from conquered people's though there was a flowering after the conquest of Constantinople throughout the Arabic world which may have stemmed from the knowledge locked up in that city filtering into the wider Arabic world and then eventually into the west.

But that it was rather it illustrate's either that the concept was never actually lost OR that it was later reinvented.

It is important however as it illustrates the wealth if knowledge and culture in India and probably also the greater related Hindu and Zoroastrian world which was mostly lost or suppressed during the early Islamic conquest period.

originally posted by: Sillyolme
I'd love to see the equation just to see it's complexity. The concept of a place holder or a symbol indicating less than one is quite complex I'd love to see it translated to Arabic numbers and the text provided with it.
Was it a bill of sale? An account of wages? Inventory of live stock?
I find this fascinating.

The image is here:
www.ancientpages.com...

But it was a placeholder dot, like a bullet point we use today in word processor lists, which is how the original Arabic
numerals were written:

4.bp.blogspot.com...

What looks like a zero to us is actually the Arabic number 5

Some modern Indian sites show Hindi-Arabic numerals, instead of Arabic. They account for the year zero as (+1),between 1 BC, and 1 AD.

So this manuscript is dated from 224-383 AD, what of it? What does it tell us about the history of zero that is new?

Zero ...

"The one that we got the zero from came from the Fertile Crescent." It first came to be between 400 and 300 B.C. in Babylon, Seife says, before developing in India, wending its way through northern Africa and, in Fibonacci's hands, crossing into Europe via Italy.

www.scientificamerican.com...

It began to take shape as a number, rather than a punctuation mark between numbers, in India in the fifth century A.D., says Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford University Press, 2000). "It isn't until then, and not even fully then, that zero gets full citizenship in the republic of numbers," Kaplan says. Some cultures were slow to accept the idea of zero, which for many carried darkly magical connotations.
The second appearance of zero occurred independently in the New World, in Mayan culture, likely in the first few centuries A.D. "That, I suppose, is the most striking example of the zero being devised wholly from scratch," Kaplan says.
Kaplan pinpoints an even earlier emergence of a placeholder zero, a pair of angled wedges used by the Sumerians to denote an empty number column some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

a reply to: seasonal

The oldest use of zero ever found in India.

The concept and digit was already in use elsewhere, as was stated.

So, this is a very minor thing to be found idling in some museum (compared to, say, an Apatosaurus skull) and certainly doesn't re-write much of the history of the number zero OR Mathematics.

In Archaeology, artifacts are very often collected more rapidly than they can be analyzed.
Same is true for Paleontology.

Harte

In Sanskrit the number 0 is 'shunya', the same as the word 'empty' as in "Form is empty, emptiness is form" and so on. So the word for zero is, to put it simply, much more ancient than the evidence for the mathematical concept. But that does beg the question of, how old is the use of the zero? My guess is, probably as old as Indian writing itself, but because of the climate (extreme temperatures and humidity) paper and cloth did not last long in ancient India. I'm not surprised it is a birch bark manuscript -- which can last longer. Birch bark is only available locally, in higher and far-northerly elevations in India, so it was relatively rare in most places. That even one survived at all is amazing.

a reply to: seasonal

a reply to: LABTECH767

Ahem I present this link... Muslims did not invent Algebra

Another false claim debunked.

a reply to: yuppa

Nice addition.