Short video about history of number 0

It's curious. It's not immediately obvious in everyday life why you need a number to show you don't have something.

If someone asks how many cars you have, you'd say 1 or 2, or I don't have a car.

Likewise if you have 5 biscuits and you sell 5, you then don't have any to sell. 

You don't naturally think of absence as having a zero quantity.

It is a mental twist as having implies possession, but you possess nothing. I think it is because language and maths are different, they probably use different parts of the brain.

(Sorry if this is what the video says, I can't see it at the moment.)

No problem! It is an interesting insight and one reason I've been reading about 0. It is unintuitive.

The question is whether zero is really sensible, does it represent something real, or is it just an artificial construct to make maths work?

The question is whether zero is really sensible, does it represent something real, or is it just an artificial construct to make maths work?

O, 1 and infinity means you have none of it, some of it, or all of it.

Infinity means an edge case where the equations break down.

I don't know, it is a great question, I simply do not have a good answer. Sean Carroll said once: there are three numbers 0, 1 and infinity. I like it.

I think he meant that 1,2,3,-1,pi,i etc. do not differ that much conceptually (well, the number-pi may be in 2 groups). But how do 0, 1 and infinity differ?

The complication of infinity is that we can not be sure it exists I in the real world. In physics it is more like t hypothesis, in math like everything it is an idea.

He may have a good answer, I sadly don't.

Stuart333 said:

The question is whether zero is really sensible, does it represent something real, or is it just an artificial construct to make maths work?

I was always taught it was a concept, not a number and was used to demark between the positive and negative number ranges. 

Positive whole numbers are called "natural" number while negatives ones are not as they also represent a concept of then numbers not being present.

Of course people being people have different ideas of the definitions of all this basic stuff, but it is really just naming conventions for things to allow maths to work.

For me 0 and infinity are both concepts as they cannot be demonstrated but are both essential for maths to work.