On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 20:20:42 +0100, Mark Lawrence wrote: > On 09/09/2015 18:59, William Ray Wing wrote: >>> On Sep 9, 2015, at 1:22 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: [snip] >> Right. Note that the Arabs, who DID invent zero, still count from one. [snip] > Would you please provide a citation to support your claim as this > http://www.livescience.com/27853-who-invented-zero.html disagrees.
That's baffling. Livescience.com says this: Robert Kaplan, author of "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero," suggests that an ancestor to the placeholder zero may have been a pair of angled wedges used to represent an empty number column. However, Charles Seife, author of "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea," disagrees that the wedges represented a placeholder. In that exact book, Seife says the exact opposite of the above allegation: Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, [graphics omitted], to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This _placeholder_ [italics in original] mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in. Either Seife completely changed his mind after my copy of his book was published (2000), or Livescience.com got it completely wrong. -- To email me, substitute nowhere->runbox, invalid->com. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list