Perhaps you've never questioned the importance of zero, but it plays a key role in math! Did you know it was one of the last digits to be created? This was because many ancient civilizations could not understand the need for a symbol to indicate the absence of a quantity.
You probably learned about the digits romans, but do you remember what was the symbol used by the Romans to represent zero?
Representation of the numbers from 1 to 10 using Roman numerals.
No need to search or despair! The Romans didn't know zero! This is not where the story began of that digit! These people learned to represent extremely large numbers, but they did not know how to represent the lack of a numerical value.
As with the Roman numerals, the Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, among others, did not have a symbol to represent zero. The Chinese, on the other hand, if they wanted to show that there was no value, they just left a blank space. Indians used the word sunya to represent the numerical void, and the Arabs used sifr with the same intention.
And do you know why we don't use any of those old numbering systems? Because they are not efficient! And why aren't they efficient? For the absence of zero! The number 1.355.852, for example, in Roman numerals, is MCCCLVDCCCLII. Hard to read, isn't it?
As in fact the presence of a “zero” was necessary, in the 3rd century BC. C., a civilization created a symbol to represent it: the Babylonians. They used the symbol 
or 
to represent the absence of a numeric value. Today we use the symbol 0 in the system hindu arabic with the same function.
But what is this Hindu-Arabic system? It is the decimal numbering system we use today, which is formed by the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. This numbering system was officially “introduced to the world” in a publication in 1202, but since the 7th century the mathematician Brahmagupta had already made definitions of zero that we still use today! He stated, for example, that The addition from zero to a number results in the number itself, whichthe sum of zero and zero is zerois thatthe product of any number by zero is zero.. However, problems appeared with the operations of subtraction and division!
In subtraction, the problem appeared when subtracting a number from zero. We now know that the result for this subtraction is a negative number, but at that time the whole numbers were not known. And the division by zero? That was another big problem! The great algebraist Bhaskara found that when you divide a number by a very small number, the quotient is a very large number. For example, when dividing 2 per 0,0000001, the result is 20.000.000! Bhaskara concluded that, from dividing a number by zero, the result should be infinite. Mathematically, we say that a division by zero is undetermined!
After all this information, you already know a little more about the history of scratch, but what about its value? Numerically, the zero represents “nothing”, an absence of value, however, semantically, this digit has an infinitely large value, being totally indispensable!
By Amanda Gonçalves
Graduated in Mathematics
