Wednesday 9 September 2020

The curious case of Zero

 THE CURIOUS CASE OF ZERO.



This is the Gwalior Inscription from India which has the oldest known example of ZERO.

There are other inscriptions from various cultures in which zero is represented by a blank space or a dot but the Indians were the first to use zero as part of a number system consistently. 




Their use rapidly spread across Asia and North Africa and reached Europe via the happy accident of an certain Italian Mathematician visiting Algeria and discovered their use.

This is what Fibonacci wrote about them.


Roughly translated from the Latin Nine figures of india ... sign ) that arabs call zephir 

Zephir contracted in popular usage to our modern zero.

However a point who else has noticed when typographers design fonts they don't always give as much attention to the numbers as the letters?

This is 0 on my keyboard.

This is O 

0 - O 

About the only difference in most fonts and calligraphy manuals too is that the 0 is narrower?











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