Sublime

Zero was born out of the need to give any given sequence of Babylonian digits a unique, permanent meaning.

instance, writing the number 87 in the Egyptian system would require 15 symbols: eight heels and seven vertical marks. The new Greek system would need only two symbols: π for 80, and ζ for 7. (The Roman system, which supplanted Greek numbers, was a step backward toward the less sophisticated Egyptian system. The Roman 87, LXXXVII, requires seven sy

TESLA: 7 FOR 7

Any number between 1 and 10 will be a multiple of 100, 10 becomes 101, 20 is 2 × 101. The advantages of this become quickly apparent as the numbers grow bigger. A 10-fold jump brings us to items counted in hundreds (102) and then to thousands (103), tens of thousands (104), hundreds of thousands (105), and millions (106).

Zero makes this cumbersome system obsolete. In the Babylonian system—with zero in it—it’s easy to write fractions. Just as we can write 0.5 for 1/2 and 0.75 for 3/4, the Babylonians used the numbers 0;30 for 1/2 and 0;45 for 3/4. (In fact, the Babylonian base-60 system is even better suited to writing down fractions than our modern-day base-10 syst