The true history of the invention of zero: teacher is misled by ignorant ethnocentrism.

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Submitted by Bob, Jul 5, 2007 04:49

I invite you to consult some good, in-depth, nonbiased, non-ethnocentric histories of mathematics to check my accuracy. I have already read some, so I can say: In the Old World (that is, not the Americas) early, primitive forms of zero were used by Mesopotamians thousands of years ago, before Mesopotamia had any significant amount of Arabs or Arabic there (Islam had not been invented, so the conquering Arabic Islamic empire had not conquered Mesopotamia, which had practically no Arabs at the time.) Zero in its modern form as a part of place notation to express numbers was invented by Indian mathematicians. The Arab world adopted a form of this mathematical method. Non-Arab Europeans learned place notation from Arab mathematicians, so those Europeans called the number system "Arabic numbers" even though the important aspects of it were not Arab or Arabic in origin. The false "fact" that an "an Arabic mathematician invented the concept of zero." is either ignorance of history, or someone's deliberate ethnocentric falsehood. Is this merely teacher ignorance in the service of someone's ethnic and cultural biases? To a sufficiently well-informed person this sure looks like it. If you want to credit Arabs and Arabic speakers with inventing something, there are real things they can be credited with. They might have invented hard liquor through the process of distillation, but for anti-truth Islamic fundamentalists that idea is not politically correct, so good luck getting them (or people intimidated by them) to brag about it! :-)

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I invite you to consult some good, in-depth, nonbiased, non-ethnocentric histories of mathematics to check my accuracy. I have already...	Bob	Jul 5, 2007 04:49
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New Brooklyn School To Offer Middle East Studies