How would you know whether an ancient culture had zero?

lisp2240 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.

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gmuslera 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).

	▲	whatsThisBtn4 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Gosh I love Wittgenstein for this. I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy). Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal. Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.