“Zero was one of the greatest inventions in human history,” I remember one of my mathematics teachers telling us at St Albert’s college, Ernakulam. Without zero we would have reached nowhere beyond some letters like X and M and C which were employed gratuitously in the Roman arithmetic. Zero simplified and complexified mathematics at once. It made easy not only counting but also all mathematical operations such as multiplication and division. Just imagine division, for example, in the Roman system. MMXLVI divided by IXCMXXXIII. Wow, that is 1946 divided by 9933, after the invention of zero. And the answer is 0.19591261451. Imagine that figure in the Roman numerals. Your imagination would go bust. There was no decimal system before the arrival of the great zero. Take any number. Say 20. 20 ÷ 20 = 1. 20 ÷ 10 = 2. 20 ÷ 4 = 5. The smaller the divisor, the greater the quotient. Take a big divisor like, say, 10000. 20 ÷ 10000 = 0.002. Now apply this logic: as t
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