Posted on 12/13/2014 6:32:47 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Of all the numerals, "0" -- alone in green on the roulette wheel -- is most significant. Unique in representing absolute nothingness, its role as a placeholder gives our number system its power. It enables the numerals to cycle, acquiring different meanings in different locations (compare 3,000,000 and 30). With the exception of the Mayan system, whose zero glyph never left the Americas, ours is the only one known to have a numeral for zero. Babylonians had a mark for nothingness, say some accounts, but treated it primarily as punctuation. Romans and Egyptians had no such numeral either...
Found on a stone stele, it was documented in 1931 by a French scholar named George Coedes. Assigned the identifying label K-127, the inscription reads like a bill of sale and includes references to slaves, five pairs of oxen and sacks of white rice. Though some of the writing wasn't deciphered, the inscription clearly bore the date 605 in an ancient calendar that began in the year A.D. 78. Its date was thus A.D. 683. Two centuries older than the one at Gwalior, it predated wide-ranging Arab trade. But K-127 disappeared during the Khmer Rouge's rule of terror, when more than 10,000 artifacts were deliberately destroyed...
The majority view is that numbers exist outside of the human mind. Unlike Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, they don't require a human creator. What gave numbers their power was the very act of naming them and writing them down. I'm now working with Cambodian officials to move K-127 to a museum in Phnom Penh, where a wide audience can appreciate the incredible discovery it represents.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
>> “How is that possible?” <<
.
Have you ever observed the spirals on the underside of pine cones? Or Agaves? Or the seeds in a sunflower?
How about the hexagonal stress relief in basaltic rocks?
Lol cos 0, sin 0
>> “ Google Chrome’s connection attempt to 127.0.0.1 was rejected. The website may be down, or your network may not be properly configured.” <<
1,0
The Muslims did not invent zero.
The Persians did, BEFORE the existing religion (Zoroastrianism) was virtually annihilated by the spread of Islam, and the wily Persian converts to Islam placed the credit (rather wrongly) on the inspiration of Mohammed Ali.
Silly Europeans. :)
The number zero has a strong meaning in our household, as in the amount of dollars we have to spend at the end of the month.
Any real or complex number to the zero power is one.
All EXCEPT for zero to the zero power, which can't be defined.
And zero divided by zero?
Again, undefined.
Zero plays by its own rules.
The fact that Fibonacci sequences exist in nature is the result of physical processes. But we often look at the result and impose our own order on nature. The same processes that generate a logarithmic spiral in a Nautilus generate a Fibonacci sequence in the seed scales of a pine cone, because a logarithmic spiral is asymptotically equivalent to a Fibonacci sequence.
Without understanding the generating processes, the presence of number in nature can acquire a mystical significance, but often what appears to be a significant relationship is just an artifact of the mathematical conventions we use (as in the case of Fibonacci sequences being convergent to a logarithmic spiral). Another example: Real numbers are a necessary abstraction, although we cannot perceive their existence as actual quantities. They do not exist in the same sense that finite, countable quantities exist.
Don’t get me wrong- I use advanced mathematics extensively in my work. There are many cognitive biases that can result in bad models, and I attempt to be very rigorous in excluding them.
I suppose this is to say that I am an Aristotelean rather than a Platonist when it comes to mathematics. It amused me in graduate school to argue this issue with one of my professors- a Hungarian emigree who was proudly atheistic - who nonetheless maintained that canonical mathematical forms existed somewhere (heaven?).
And by saying this I am not rejecting the idea of Creation or design- it is evident everywhere, but our understanding of nature is still very superficial.
I haven't, since MCMLVI.
Of course. I was being sarcastic and should have included the /s tag! LOL!
Math is harder using Roman numerals though
The discovery of negative numbers was probably more significant, for it enabled the invention of government spending.
Look I just invented the Zero!
So what does it do?
Oh nothing.
VIxIV=XXIV
try the long division.."Math is hard"
Arabic numbers, yes, that the Arabs got from someone else.
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