Ancient India gave the world 'nothing'. Quite literally

Few Indians do pride themselves on giving the world nothing. It has been a widely accepted fact that zero – regarded as one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics – originated in ancient India. A recent discovery not only proves that fact, but also places the origin of zero or “shunya” much before what was earlier recorded.

According to new research, scientists have traced the origins of the quantification of nothingness to an ancient Indian text known as the Bakhshali manuscript. Radiocarbon dating this ancient text, which has been housed in the UK since 1902, revealed that zero was first recorded as early as the 3rd or 4th century, almost half a millennium before its earlier recorded period.

The Bakhshali manuscript – inscribed on 70 pieces of birch bark – contains hundreds of zeroes, and has been widely acknowledged as the oldest Indian mathematical text. It was discovered by a farmer in 1881 in a village called Bakhshali, near Peshawar in Pakistan, where it was buried under a field. The text was subsequently acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Translations of the text, which is written in Sanskrit, suggest it was a form of training manual for merchants trading across the Silk Road, and includes basic arithmetic exercises. “There’s a lot of ‘If someone buys this and sells this how much have they got left?’” said Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at University of Oxford.

This discovery successfully proves that zero predates a ninth century inscription on the wall of a temple in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, which was previously considered to be the oldest recorded example of a zero in India.

The exact age of the manuscript has, for a long time now, been debated. Studies on the manuscript conducted by Japanese scholar Hayashi Takao, had stated that the text could have been as old as the eighth century and as new as the 12th century, based on the style of writing and and mathematical content.

Latest carbon dating reveals that the reason why it was previously so difficult for scholars to point to the Bakhshali manuscript’s date may have been because the manuscript is composed of material from at least three different periods.

“The zero symbol that we use today evolved from a dot that was used in ancient India and can be seen throughout the Bakhshali manuscript. The dot was originally used as a ‘placeholder’, meaning it was used to indicate orders of magnitude in a number system – for example, denoting 10s, 100s and 1000s,” the library said.

Of course, zero used as a placeholder has been observed in several different ancient cultures, such as the ancient Mayan and Babylonian. It was, however, the dot symbol in the Bakhshali script that ultimately evolved into the hollow-centred version of the symbol that we use today, which was first described in a text called Brahmasphutasiddhanta, written by Indian astronomer and mathematician Brahmagupta in 628AD.

Du Sautoy said, “Today we take it for granted that the concept of zero is used across the globe and our whole digital world is based on nothing or something. But there was a moment when there wasn’t this number.”

“We now know that it was as early as the third century that mathematicians in India planted the seed of the idea that would later become so fundamental to the modern world. The findings show how vibrant mathematics has been in the Indian subcontinent for centuries,” he added.

“These surprising research results testify to the subcontinent’s rich and longstanding scientific tradition,” said Richard Ovenden, head of the Bodleian Library.

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