Finding Zero Read Online Free PDF Page A

digits as “Indian.” We thus have in this one source an indication both for an Indian and for an Arabic origin for our modern numbers.
    This number system introduced into Europe in the late Middle Ages was far superior to the Roman one used until then. It allowed an immense economy of notation so that the same digit, for example 4, can be used to convey itself or forty (40) when followed by a zero, or four hundred and four when written as 404, or four thousand when written as a 4 followed by three zeros (4000). The power of the Arabic, or Hindu, or Hindu-Arabic number system is incomparable as it allows us to represent numbers efficiently andcompactly, enabling us to perform complicated arithmetic calculations that could not have been easily done before.
    But the real origin of our amazing number system based on nine digits plus a place-holding zero remained a mystery. The nine numerals had been conjectured to originate in India, as Fibonacci had implied, but there was no unambiguous scholarly proof of this belief. And the zero: Was it Arabic, or Indian, or did it come from some other place? I still didn’t know.

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    I eventually built a career as a mathematician and statistician. For several years, I was a professor of mathematics at the University of Alaska in Juneau, and there, in 1984, Debra and I got married just below the Mendenhall Glacier, surrounded by Douglas fir trees, with occasional brown bears coming in from the forest to feed on the salmon making their way up the Mendenhall River. We had met at the university a few months earlier, when I helped Debra with a statistical problem about how well the university attracted and retained students from a diverse population of Alaska natives and Americans who had moved there from the Lower 48, and we fell in love.
    Some years after our wedding by the glacier, we moved to Boston and I started teaching at Bentley University. Debra took a position running a program at MIT, our daughter Miriam was born, and I wrote a number of popular books on the history of mathematics and science.
    In 2008, I got a call from my friend Dr. Andres Roemer, a Mexican intellectual who had studied policy at Harvard, got his PhD at Berkeley, and was the host of popular television showsproduced in Mexico and aired throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Andres invited me to speak about probability theory at an international conference he was inaugurating. After the conference, Debra and I went to see the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Unexpectedly, this visit to a museum rekindled my childhood interest in the origins of numbers.
    In the main hall of the museum, on the wall facing the entering visitor, we were greeted by the stunning Aztec Stone of the Sun. A circular stone 12 feet in diameter and weighing more than 24 tons, this artifact, attached to the museum’s wall, bears a central face, believed to represent the Aztec god of the sun, Tonatiuh. Around it are markings and designs that have never beendeciphered. This might have served as an ancient calendar. This curious archaeological find reminded me of something I had seen decades earlier with Laci on our visit to Athens.

    The enigmatic Aztec Stone of the Sun at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology.
    Just below the Acropolis, at the periphery of the Plaka, there stands an ancient Greek tower dated to the second century BCE. This tower is octagonal in shape to represent the eight winds that navigators have recognized since antiquity—each wind blowing from one of the compass directions: north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest. Could there be a connection? I wondered: Could the Aztec Stone of the Sun also represent the eight cardinal directions, just as the Tower of the Winds had?
    Debra and I marveled at this ancient Aztec artifact with its perfect geometrical design and intricate markings. We wondered what it truly represented and what its purpose might have been.