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Hey, Shorewavers, it's Regina Barber. 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.

So zero was invented relatively late in history. It was first thought to be invented around like

2,500 years ago by Babylonian traders in ancient Mesopotamia, actually.

That's Yasmin Sopla Kolo. She's a science writer at Quantum Magazine.

Back then, they used the 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 seventh 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 one and two and three after that it kind of went out from

India to the Arab world and then you know in the 13 century, Feminacci 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.

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