The Bakhshali manuscript contains the oldest-known incidence of the number zero, preceding the current-oldest (an inscription on a temple wall in Gwalior etched in the 9 century) by several centuries. The manuscript is a collection of 70 Sanskrit-covered birch bark leaves exploring the field of mathematics. It was first discovered near the village of Bakshali (present-day Pakistan) in 1881, and has been housed at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library since 1902. Carbon dating of the text shows the date of origin as between 224 AD and 383 AD instead of the commonly-assumed 801-900 AD. There are hundreds of zeros throughout the manuscript, all of which are denoted using a simple dot.
The scholars argue that the work written on the leaves of the Bakhshali manuscript is a unified treatise on arithmetic that must have been written at the time of the latest of the manuscript’s leaves, not the earliest. The treatise shows no signs of being a jumble of fragments from different periods. Both the handwriting and the topic being discussed are continuous across the boundary of the first two dated leaves. It looks very much as if the scribe, who may have lived at the end of the eighth century, wrote out his treatise on a group of leaves that had been manufactured at very different times.
But of greater significance for the history of mathematics is the authors’ evidence showing that the Bakhshali treatise does indeed know the “true” zero, and contains calculations like long multiplication that would have necessitated using zero as an arithmetical number. Furthermore, the treatise even contains a statement saying, “having added one to zero…,” thus proving that the early Sanskrit author was thinking about zero in a numerical way.
The zero in the Bakhshali treatise is younger, but more important than Oxford claimed.
Credit : Science Daily
Picture Credit : Google
