Nothing
Before zero became a number, nothingness had already occupied the minds of philosophers, mathematicians and gods.
“In the beginning, there was neither existence nor non-existence…”
8th Century AD
By the 8th century, the rapidly expanding Islamic caliphates stretched across vast territories, from Central Asia in the east to the Iberian Peninsula in the west. The Indian subcontinent too had begun witnessing centuries of invasions, conflicts and political upheavals.
Baghdad, the heart of the Abbasid world and a great cultural crossroads, flourished with enormous wealth and an equally enormous thirst for knowledge. In the House of Wisdom, scholars translated, studied and debated Indian mathematics, Sanskrit texts, Persian knowledge and Greek philosophy, including the works of Aristotle.
“Nothing can be created from nothing.”
Mathematics was among the many subjects they explored.
The Greeks had no mathematical zero in the sense we understand it today. Aristotle, while writing extensively about infinity, rejected the idea of an actual infinite. For him, infinity could exist only as a potential… something that could always be extended, but never completed.
And then there was the strange problem of nothing.
What happens when you subtract a number from itself?
5 − 5 = ?
The answer was not merely an arithmetic curiosity.
It was nothing.
And eventually, humanity gave that nothing a name.
“Where there is the Infinite, there is joy; there is no joy in the finite.”
Zero was not entirely foreign to India.
The idea of shunya… emptiness, void, nothingness… had deep philosophical roots in the Indian intellectual tradition. Indian mathematicians eventually transformed this philosophical intuition into something extraordinarily practical: zero as a number.
By the 7th century, Brahmagupta had already described rules for arithmetic involving zero.
And perhaps the philosophical idea had prepared the ground long before mathematics arrived.
In Indian spirituality, the formless was not necessarily the absence of everything. Shiva could be understood as Nishkala… without form, without attributes, without division.
Nothingness did not always mean emptiness.
Sometimes, nothingness was the doorway to everything.
“Does man forget that We created him out of nothing?”
The scholars of Baghdad inherited Greek philosophy, but they also encountered something new through Indian mathematics.
The Indian numeral system, including zero, travelled westward through the Islamic intellectual world. Among the great mathematicians who helped develop and transmit this knowledge was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
His book al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa’l-muqabala… The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing… gave the world the word algebra.
His name gave us another word:
Zero had begun its journey from an idea of nothingness to one of the most powerful objects in mathematics.
And mathematics would never be the same again.
A Punch from the 11th Century AD
The argument between philosophy and mathematics continued.
Centuries later, the Muslim philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali launched a fierce attack on several doctrines of the Greek philosophical tradition, particularly those associated with thinkers such as Avicenna.
The old Greek questions remained stubborn:
Can nothing exist?
Can infinity exist?
Can there be a void?
And perhaps the strangest question of all:
Being omnipotent, God can create a vacuum.
And suddenly the argument becomes theological.
If God can create everything, can He create nothing?
If nothing exists, what does it mean to say that it exists?
If zero represents nothing, why can we perform mathematics with it?
And if infinity has no end, how can we even speak about it?
Perhaps this is why zero is so strange.
It is nothing that behaves like something.
And infinity is something that refuses to become a thing.
Gowri Shankar
1978 – 20… AD
It is unfortunate.
I wasn’t there to explain Aristotle.
He would have accepted my theory without hesitation.