Happy New Year, Short Wavers! What better time to contemplate the conundrum that is zero than this, the reset of the year? Zero is a fairly new concept in human history and even more recent as a number. It wasn't until around the 7th century that zero was being used as a number. That's when it showed up in the records of Indian mathematicians. Since then, zero has, at times, been met with some fear — at one point, the city of Florence, Italy banned the number.Today, scientists seek to understand how much humans truly comprehend zero — and why it seems to be different from other numbers. That's how we ended up talking to science writer Yasemin Saplakoglu about the neuroscience of this number that means nothing.Read more of Yasemin's reporting on zero for Quanta Magazine. Plus, check out our episode on why big numbers break our brains.Thirst for more math episodes? Let us know what kind of stories you want to hear from us in 2025 by emailing [email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shortwavers, it's Regina Barber. And today is the first day of 2025. Happy New Year! The new year is all about blank slates. New beginnings, starting from scratch. And so we thought, what better time than now to focus on the number that signifies origin points. Literally starting from nothing. Zero. Zero.
So Zira was invented relatively late in history. It was first thought to be invented around 2,500 years ago by Babylonian traders in ancient Mesopotamia, actually. That's Yasmin Soplicolu. She's a science writer at Quantum magazine. Back then, they used a symbol like two slanted wedges on clay tablets. But at the time, it wasn't a number yet.
It was really used as a placeholder so that you can distinguish between different types of numbers like 20 or 250 or 205. And Yasmin says that this idea of a placeholder wasn't totally unique. The ancient Maya, for example, had a little shell symbol that they used in a similar way. But zero didn't really become a number on its own until around the 7th century.
There were Indian mathematicians who came up with a couple of ways to use zero as a number, and they were the kind of first to figure out that zero could be a digit, just like the other numbers, like 1 and 2 and 3. After that, it kind of went out from India to the Arab world. And then, you know, in the 13th century, Fominachi actually picked up the idea during his travels in North Africa.
And he brought it back to medieval Europe, you know, along with the base 10 number system. But in medieval Europe, not everyone was thrilled about this concept of zero.
People had difficulty with accepting it. It was kind of scary. People were confused by it. Some thought of it as like the devil's number that challenged like really deeply held ideas. And, you know, because of the influence of the church, like philosophers and theologians associated nothing with like chaos and disorder. One city, Florence, Italy, actually banned the number zero altogether.
It's a weird concept if you even think too deeply about it. It's like we're describing something that doesn't exist, right? We like see three chairs or we see four birds and we can count those and they're, you know, physically there. But we don't see zero birds or zero chairs. We just know that they're absent. But that is zero. That's, you know, an extra level of abstraction from the other thing.
kinds of numbers that we see around us all the time. And that abstraction actually makes it harder for our brains to process. So today on the show, the neuroscience of the number zero. How do humans think about the concept of nothing? How do we find out? And what does that mean for our brains? You're
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