Throughout the history of man's intellectual development and the expansion of his understanding of the world around him, there has been a gradual unification of seemingly disjoined areas of knowledge: art and religion, biology and psychology, and so on. Mathematics and philosophy are two areas of knowledge that have also developed through such a symbiotic relationship; many historically famous mathematicians, such as René Descartes, are also known for carrying forward their own philosophical ideas, such as Descartes' famous dictum, Cogito ergo sum. However, overall, it is not very common for a concept or idea in one field to generate another idea or concept in another field, especially in the case of mathematics and philosophy, since a field is the basis of practically all man's scientific activity. progress, while the other is a cornerstone for practically all of man's spiritual development. This is not to say that such events do not occur in these two areas. Indeed, one of the most important developments in the entire history of mathematics has its roots in the teachings of one of the most influential religions in the world today. The invention of the number zero and the subsequent development of a written representation of the number zero, considered by many scholars to be among the most influential and important developments in mathematics, began in the philosophies of various religious figures of the Indian civilization more than two thousand years ago . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Although the identity of the true inventors of the number zero is hotly contested by scholars today, most scholars agree that the number zero and the The circular symbol representing this number originated in India around 9th century. However, there are good reasons to believe that the concept of the number zero, if not the symbol for zero, was already in common use among Indian mathematicians at least a century earlier, depending on the sources consulted; in fact, there are some scholars who refer to a manuscript dating back to approximately the 2nd century BC which uses the number zero in calculating the number of arrangements of two different elements in an unspecified number of places (Datta 75). Regardless of the exact date of the origin of zero, it can be said that until the Indian number system, together with the symbol of zero, was imported to Baghdad in the middle of the 9th century, Indian mathematicians were the only ones in the world as they developed a growing number of methods for various calculations and applications using the number zero in one way or another. In fact, all known Hindu treatises on arithmetic and algebra contained a section entirely devoted to basic mathematical operations involving the number zero (Datta 80). Older manuscripts show zero being used to represent placeholders in numbers like one million, while later manuscripts show zero being treated as a real number, like one and two, that can be manipulated and used in calculations instead of using zero like a simple number. placeholder. Some 8th-century manuscripts even used the zero symbol to represent unknown quantities in equations, just as mathematicians use x, y, and z to represent unknown quantities in equations today. But why India? Why did the Indus Valley Civilization have a symbol and concrete understanding of the concept of zero, and no other civilization until the 9th century had a zero? To begin walking the path to answering this question we need to examine the etymology of the word “zero”. The word "zero", as well as its rather archaic synonym "digit", both derive from the Arabic sifr, meaning "vacant";this Arabic word, in turn, derives from the Sanskrit word sunya, meaning “vacant” or “empty” (Karpinski 152). Surely, the concept behind the word "nothing" predates even the Indus Valley Civilization. However, even though previous civilizations had understood that there was such a concept as nothingness, no civilization seemed to consider it important enough to actually consider the concept of nothingness as an integral part of the reality in which it lived; otherwise, Greek civilization, whose mathematical contributions such as the Pythagorean theorem and the numerous theorems of pre-collegiate geometry are well known even to casual mathematics amateurs, might have realized that their mathematical calculations could benefit from a concept like that's number zero. The reason why Indian civilization was the first to develop widespread application of the concept of zero in mathematics and science can be found in the religious aspect of Indian civilization. Specifically, the concept of nothingness and its importance are found in the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism of the 2nd century, and in Buddhism in general, whose presence in India was felt as early as the 6th century BC. Classical Buddhism, that is, Buddhism derived mainly from Gli Siddartha Gautama's teachings have as one of its central tenets the idea of ​​sunyata, which literally means "emptiness". Sunyata is emptiness in the sense that every event in the universe is merely relative and not absolute, nor does any event possess any self-subsistence (Smart 95). Nagarjuna, probably one of the most famous Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosophers, took the idea of ​​sunyata a step further and taught in his philosophical writings, written during the second century, that all things are "empty" in that nothing has its own nature in if. (Intelligent 110). Nagarjuna also extended this "philosophy of emptiness" beyond "classical" Buddhism by naming the otherwise indescribable Ultimate or Truth beyond Reality that is perceived by those who have not yet achieved nirvana as Sunya, which is the Sanskrit word for emptiness. It can be seen, therefore, that Indian civilization was the only major civilization of the time to have incorporated the idea of ​​"nothingness" into its spiritual or religious aspect; therefore, it would make sense that Indian civilization was the first civilization to fully develop the concept of zero and apply this concept to the advancement of mathematics, science, and the expansion of scientific knowledge in general. Another interesting reason why the Indus Valley Civilization should be the logical choice for the origin of zero, in retrospect, is the fact that no other civilization at the time used the gigantic numbers of the Indian civilization. Although most religions of the time, as well as the religions of past civilizations, were polytheistic, none had as many divine and semi-divine entities as the Hindu faith. Traditionally, there are 330 million deities worshiped by Hindus across India (Smart 40). Furthermore, in many works of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist literature, numbers much higher than one million are common. For example, in the Ramayana, a spy tells his sovereign king the exact number of troops in his rival's army; the number of men in the army would be represented, if written, as the number one, followed by sixty-two zeros (Srinivasiengar 3). Obviously, without the number zero, this type of numerical quantity would have been impossible to write. As a final example of how Hindus prodigiously used zero in their religion, it is interesting to note that Hindus today believe that the human race lives in the Kali Yuga era, one of the four eras through which the world is living. exist before being destroyed to renew itself. The duration in years of Kali Yuga is 432,000 years, and the three ages that preceded it."