Jab Zero Diya Mere Bharat Ne

An excerpt from Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Something to make every India proud…

“The Greeks did not know arithmetic, at least not in a form that is easy to work with. In Athens in the fifth century B.C., for instance, at the height of Greek civilization, a person who wanted to write down a number used a kind of alphabetic code. The first nine of the twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet stood for the numbers we call 1 through 9. The next nine letters stood for the numbers we call 10, 20, 30, and so on. And the last six letters plus three additional symbols stood for the first nine hundreds (100, 200, and so on, to 900). If you think you have trouble with arithmetic now, imagine trying to subtract ΔΓΘ from ΧΦΖ! To make matters worse, the order in which the ones, tens, and hundreds were written didn’t really matter: sometimes the hundreds were written first, sometimes last, and sometimes all order was ignored. Finally, the Greeks had no zero.

“The concept of zero came to Greece when Alexander invaded the Babylonian Empire in 331 B.C. Even then, although the Alexandrians began to use the zero to denote the absence of a number, it wasn’t employed as a number in its own right. In modern mathematics the number 0 has two key properties: in addition it is the number that, when added to any other number, leaves the other number unchanged, and in multiplication it is the number that, when multiplied by any other number, is itself unchanged. This concept wasn’t introduced until the ninth century, by the Indian mathematician Mahavira.”

Remember the song…

“Jab zero diya mere Bharat ne, Bharat ne mere Bharat ne, Duniya ko tab ginti aayi,

Taro ki bhasha Bharat ne, Duniya ko pehle sikhlayi,

Deta na dasmalav Bharat to, Yo chand pe jaana mushkil tha,

Dharti aur chand ki duri ka andaza lagana mushkil tha…

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

~ by TCG Inc. on July 14, 2008.