January 16, 2007 in Math | 2 comments | Post a comment What is the origin of zero? How did we indicate nothingness before zero? Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero and former professor of mathematics at Harvard University, provides this answer: The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. There, a slant