About 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...

Zero is a number. But unlike other numbers, zero represents not a thing, but an absence of a thing, or nothing. So understanding zero requires us to recognise the absence of something. From our ...

A black dot on a third-century Indian manuscript has been identified by Oxford University as the first recorded use of the mathematical symbol for zero, 500 years earlier than previously thought.