Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

Unlike Greece, India never had a fear of the infinite or of the void. Indeed, it embraced them.

Our numbers evolved from the symbols that the Indians used; by rights they should be called Indian numerals rather than Arabic ones (Figure 14).

Unlike the Greeks, the Indians did not see squares in square numbers or the areas of rectangles when they multiplied two different values. Instead, they saw the interplay of numerals—numbers stripped of their geometric significance. This was the birth of what we now know as algebra.

To the Indians, negative numbers made perfect sense. Indeed, it was in India (and in China) that negative numbers first appeared. Brahmagupta, an Indian mathematician of the seventh century, gave rules for dividing numbers by each other, and he included the negatives.