The Trouble With Zero

Short Wave

NPR

News, Life Sciences, Daily News, Astronomy, Nature, Science

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

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 shortwave@npr.org!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from Side Note by ASAP Science, a podcast about the science behind controversial subjects.
0:06.6	Is marijuana addictive? How will the universe end?
0:10.1	Hosts Mitch and Greg dissect a new topic every Wednesday on your favorite podcast app.
0:15.9	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:21.2	Hey, Sherwaivers, it's Regina Barber.
0:23.5	And today is the first day of 2025.
0:27.2	Happy New Year!
0:29.4	The New Year is all about blank slates.
0:32.6	New beginnings, starting from scratch.
0:34.2	And so we thought, what better time than now to focus on the number that signifies origin points, literally starting from scratch. And so we thought, what better time than now to focus on the number that
0:38.4	signifies origin points, literally starting from nothing, zero. So zero was invented relatively
0:45.7	late in history. It was first thought to be invented around like 2,500 years ago by Babylonian
0:52.0	traders in ancient Mesopotamia, actually. That's Yasmin Soplaikolu. She's a science
0:57.5	writer at Quantum Magazine. Back then, they used the symbol like two slanted wedges on clay tablets,
1:02.1	but at the time, it wasn't a number yet. It was really used as a placeholder so that you can
1:09.0	distinguish between different types of numbers like
1:11.7	20 or 250 or 205.
1:14.4	And Yasmin says that this idea of a placeholder wasn't totally unique.
1:18.7	The ancient Maya, for example, had a little shell symbol that they used in a similar way.
1:23.6	But Zero didn't really become a number on its own until around the 7th century.
1:28.3	There were Indian mathematicians who came up with a couple of ways to use zero as a number,
1:35.3	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.
	...

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