Why is zero such a strange number?
Zero's Big Nothing
Why is zero such a strange number?
Zero is the only number that means "nothing"—and that makes it both the simplest and the strangest number we've got. It's a placeholder, a starting point, a boundary between positive and negative, and a mathematical troublemaker all rolled into one.
For most of human history, zero didn't exist. Ancient Romans had no symbol for it—their number system just skipped from I to II without stopping to count "none." If you had zero apples, you simply didn't write anything. The absence of apples wasn't worth mentioning.
