History — Zero and positional notation
The symbol "" that we take for granted today is a relatively recent achievement. Greek and Roman mathematicians had no symbol for zero: in the Roman system it was impossible to write “zero sheep” without using words. It was the mathematicians of India, around the 5th–6th century AD, who introduced a zero as a placeholder and then as a genuine number in every respect. The Sanskrit term śūnya (“empty”) passed into Arabic as sifr, from which both “zero” and “cipher” derive.
The Indo-Arabic positional system reached Europe thanks to the Islamic mathematicians and was made popular by Leonardo Pisano, known as Fibonacci, in his Liber Abaci (1202): a book that explained the advantage of the new system over Roman numerals — for example, it managed to multiply two three-digit numbers without resorting to the abacus. It nevertheless took more than two centuries for zero to be fully accepted by European merchants and administrators (cf. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, ch. 9).
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Topics: Numbers and operations
Concepts: Number sets · Zero
People: Leonardo Fibonacci