According to D. E. Smith, in his history of mathematics, ‘the earliest undoubted occurrence of a zero in India is in an inscription of 876’–in other words, more than two centuries after the first mention of the use of the other nine numerals. It is still not certain where the zero was first introduced, and the concept of nought, or emptiness, was independently arrived at by the Mayans, as we shall see in a later chapter. Joseph Needham, the Cambridge-based historian of Chinese
