Astrommi cast, episode 466, the origins of zero.

Welcome to Astrommi cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help

you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of the universe today.

With me is Dr. Pamela Gay, the director of technology and citizen science, and the

astronomical society, the Pacific and the director of Cosmic Quest.

Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you?

Good and you are calling in from the country's capital, your country's capital.

I am, yes, my country capital.

It's far warmer than yours, I think, right now.

Yeah, I'm near Delice Airport at a meeting location for a collaboration meeting for everyone

who receives the kind of funding that I get from NASA that is basically designed to

allow us to better collaborate, keep up to date on what we're all doing, and find ways

to prevent duplication of effort and spread the effort better across all of us.

Perfect, and so if you sound a little different, that's because you're recording on your portable

audio device that's sitting in front of you from your hotel, Wi-Fi, this is us being

incredibly flexible to make this episode happen.

So I'm really glad you were able to sneak in some time to be able to make this happen.

We depend on zero for our math to work right, but this number was actually invented in

fairly recent times.

Why do we need zero?

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