[Horse to Platt] The history of '0' is fascinating - I remember having a very long conversation (couple of hours) with one of my college lecturers some years ago and did a bit of research into it's history around that time.
[Arlo] It's funny that we (the West) take zero as a number without question, when in fact it is one of the better examples of "paradox" out there. "Zero" is at its most basic a "number" which means "no number". We understand the sentence "I have zero horses" as a numerical count of the horses I posses, but in fact the sentence means "I have no horses to count". However, without the acceptance of this "paradox" into our mathematics, algebra would be impossible (mayhap to the delight of high school students across the land). I found the Wikipedia article interesting, and wanted to highlight that the Maya (pre-Columbian Maya) had a "zero" in their number system as well. Indeed, following the link to "Maya numerals" one finds this. "However, since the eight earliest Long Count dates appear outside the Maya homeland, it is assumed that the use of zero predated the Maya, and was possibly the invention of the Olmec." (Wikipedia) As such, "zero" also found a place in Incan numbering, interestingly as a "space", "... a base ten positional system. Zero is represented by the absence of a knot in the appropriate position." (Wikipedia) I'd also highlight another passage from that Wikipedia page on "null", which parallels Pirsig. "In databases a field can have a null value. This is equivalent to the field not having a value. For numeric fields it is not the value zero. For text fields this is not blank nor the empty string. The presence of null values leads to three-valued logic. No longer is a condition either true or false, but it can be undetermined. Any computation including a null value delivers a null result. Asking for all records with value 0 or value not equal 0 will not yield all records, since the records with value null are excluded." (Wikipedia) Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
