Of all the numbers that exist, there’s something special about zero. We can find real-world examples of other numbers, be it $1, 99 red balloons, 100 years of solitude or any other thing we care to tabulate. But it’s difficult to find examples of nothingness — even the supposed vacuum of space is disturbed by faint gusts of hydrogen atoms.
Perhaps that’s why zero is a fairly recent invention. While it popped up in different forms in various places, the concept of nothing as a number is just a few thousand years old, at the most. And sometimes it never seems to have existed at all. Both the Egyptians and Romans didn’t appear to use zero.
Nonetheless, zero is quite important to us today. The concept plays a foundational role in calculus, as we calculate derivatives converging upon zero. It’s also used in coordinate systems on graphs, which begin at the point (0, 0).
