India's impressive concept about nothing
The invention of zero was a hugely significant mathematical development, one that is fundamental to calculus, which made physics, engineering and much of modern technology possible.
In Gwalior, a congested city in the centre of the India, an 8th-Century fort rises with medieval swagger on a plateau in the town’s heart. Gwalior Fort is one of India’s largest forts; but look among the soaring cupola-topped towers, intricate carvings and colourful frescoes and you’ll find a small, 9th-Century temple carved into its solid rock face.
Chaturbhuj Temple is much like many other ancient temples in India – except that this is ground zero for zero. It’s famous for being the oldest example of zero as a written digit: carved into the temple wall is a 9th-Century inscription that includes the clearly visible number ‘270’.
The invention of the zero was a hugely significant mathematical development, one that is fundamental to calculus, which made physics, engineering and much of modern technology possible. But what was it about Indian culture that gave rise to this creation that’s so important to modern India – and the modern world?
Indians, unlike people from many other cultures, were already philosophically open to the concept of nothingness. Systems such as yoga were developed to encourage meditation and the emptying of the mind, while both the Buddhist and Hindu religions embrace the concept of nothingness as part of their teachings.
Dr Peter Gobets, secretary of the Netherlands-based ZerOrigIndia Foundation, or the Zero Project, which researches the origins of the zero digit, noted in an article on the invention of zero that “Mathematical zero (‘shunya’ in Sanskrit) may have arisen from the contemporaneous philosophy of emptiness or Shunyata [a Buddhist doctrine of emptying one’s mind from impressions and thoughts]”. In addition, the nation has long had a fascination with sophisticated mathematics. Early Indian mathematicians were obsessed with giant numbers, counting well into the trillions when the Ancient Greeks stopped at about 10,000. They even had different types of infinity.
Hindu astronomers and mathematicians Aryabhata, born in 476, and Brahmagupta, born in 598, are both popularly believed to have been the first to formally describe the modern decimal place value system and present rules governing the use of the zero symbol. Although Gwalior has long been thought to be the site of the first occurrence of the zero written as a circle, an ancient Indian scroll called the Bhakshali manuscript, which shows a placeholder dot symbol, was recently carbon dated to the 3rd or 4rd Centuries. It is now considered the earliest recorded occurrence of zero. Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, is quoted as saying, “[T]he creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics. We now know that it was as early as the 3rd Century that mathematicians in India planted the seed of the idea that would later become so fundamental to the modern world. The findings show how vibrant mathematics have been in the Indian sub-continent for centuries.”
So maybe there is something to these connected ideas, to the spiritual wisdom of India that gave rise to meditation and the invention of zero. There’s another connected idea, too, which has had a profound effect on the modern world. The concept of zero is essential to a system that’s at the basis of modern computing: binary numbers.
As you drive out of Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport towards the city centre, about 37km away, you’re greeted by large signs stuck somewhat incongruously into the ground of rural India. They proclaim the names of the new gods of modern India, the companies at the forefront of the digital revolution. Intel, Google, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Samsung and Amazon all have offices in Bengaluru, along with home-grown heroes like Infosys and Wipro.
Before the IT industry came to Bengaluru, it was called Bangalore, and was known as Garden City. Now it’s Bengaluru and is known as the Silicon Valley of India. What started in the 1970s as a single industrial park, Electronic City, to expand the electronics industry in the state of Karnataka, has paved the way for today’s boomtown. The city now boasts many IT parks and is home to nearly 40% of the country’s IT industry. Bengaluru may even overtake Silicon Valley, with predictions suggesting it could become the single largest IT hub on Earth by 2020, with two million IT professionals, six million indirect IT jobs and $80 billion in IT exports. It’s binary numbers that make this possible.
Modern-day digital computers operate on the principle of two possible states, ‘on’ and ‘off ’. The ‘on’ state is assigned the value ‘1’, while the ‘off ’ state is assigned the value ‘0’. Or, zero. “It is perhaps not surprising that binary number system was also invented in India, in the 2nd or 3rd Centuries BCE by a musicologist named Pingala, although this use was for prosody,” said Subhash Kak, historian of science and astronomy and Regents Professor at Oklahoma State University.
The chaos and congestion that’s the hallmark of India’s metropolises reaches something of a zenith in Bengaluru, where it can take an hour to drive 3km. Nevertheless, the inhabitants carry bravely on, living as close to the high-tech campuses as possible – and even on them in some cases – creating start-ups, designing software and supplying the world with IT products and know-how. It’s hard to imagine the number of computer chips and bits and programs that have come from Bengaluru, the number of computers and devices built and powered. And even more impossible to imagine is the number of binary-system zeroes it has all taken.
And yet all of this started in India… from nothing.