shunya

A placeholder is needed to make it clear that there are no sata, and the Indians used the word shunya—meaning “void”—to refer to this placeholder.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010

A placeholder is needed to make it clear that there are no sata, and the Indians used the word shunya—meaning “void”—to refer to this placeholder.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010

A placeholder is needed to make it clear that there are no sata, and the Indians used the word shunya—meaning “void”—to refer to this placeholder.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010

The Sanskrit term shunya and the Tibetan translation of it, tongpa (stong-pa), after all, are both also the words for “zero.”

Visualization 1998

Zero took its first tentative steps as a bona fide number under the tutelage of Indian mathematicians such as Brahmagupta, who in the seventh century showed how shunya behaved toward its number siblings.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010

Sitting in front of me was Mr. Zero himself, the embodiment of shunya in flesh and bone.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010

Answer: Regarding religious experience, some understanding of shunya (emptiness: lack of independent self nature) some feeling, some experience and mostly bodhichitta, altruism.

Questions & Answers 2010

And if you multiply shunya by a fortune, you get shunya, in other words 0 × a = 0.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010

Answer: Regarding religious experience, some understanding of shunya (emptiness: lack of independent self nature) some feeling, some experience and mostly bodhichitta, altruism.

Questions & Answers 2010

After adopting shunya as a placeholder, the Indians took the idea and ran with it, upgrading shunya into a fully fledged number of its own: zero.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010