Some of the world’s greatest thinkers will gather in New Delhi next month for a three-day conference about nothing. More specifically, they will be discussing the concept of zero – and attempting to establish exactly when and where it originated. While numbers and counting have been around for thousands of years, it is unclear when zero was conceptualised. Its “discovery” was vital for the complex mathematics, physics and other science that has followed. Without it, technological progress would not have occurred.
The fact is that we know next to nothing about the origins of zero. India has long claimed to be its birthplace and it certainly was in use there in the fifth century AD. But there are also claimants from the Arab world, South East Asia and South America.
The event, dubbed Camp Zero, will bring together mathematicians, philosophers, astrophysicists, archaeologists and numismatists who will consider all the evidence and hopefully come up with something about the origin of nothing.
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