NOTHING GETS OLDER

Carbon dating has revealed zeros that date back 500 years earlier than had previously been seen. The numbers appear in the Bakhshali manuscript, an ancient Indian text consisting of 70 leaves of birch bark filled with mathematics and text in Sanskrit, held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Until now, it was thought that the first zero had been carved on a wall in Gwalior, India, in AD 876. However, the Bakhshali manuscript, named after the village where it was found in 1881 buried in a field in what is now Peshawar, north-west Pakistan, has been carbon dated to between AD 224 and 383. The document, seemingly a training manual for merchants, was acquired by AFR Hoernle, an Indianologist, who presented it to the Bodleian in 1902.

For decades, judging by the style of the calligraphy, it was thought to have been written between the eighth and 12th centuries. In the text, zero is denoted by a dot, which later evolved into the round symbol that we know today. It was used as a placeholder, as with the Mayans and Babylonians, but only the Indian dot would go on to gain true number status, first described in AD 628 by the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta. The concept of zero allowed for the development of calculus, and underpins the digital age. The Greeks and Romans had no symbol for zero, but India had “a culture that is quite happy to conceive of the void, to conceive of the infinite” said Marcus Du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford. D.Telegraph, 15 Sept; New Scientist, 23 Sept 2017.