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Originally Posted by ajazz  Assalamulykum
yes the Arabs got it from India
Here is interesting story how zero was invented How Was Zero Invented?
In A.D. 810, Baghdad was the capital of the Arab world. The grand palace in Baghdad was called "The House of Wisdom" and drew Arab mathematicians and scientists to it. The most famous of these was Muhammad ibn Musa known as AI-Khwarizmi. the mathemati*cian. In the spring of that year, while the desert wind whispered outside and juicy dates rip*ened on the palm trees. a great debate raged inside the Caliph's (ruler's) chambers.
Three men took part in the debate: the Caliph, himself. Al-Khwarizmi. and the palace mathematician. Ahmand ibn Aziz. They argued about sifr, "the empty place," what we call zero. Years before. Al-Khwarizmi had helped convince the court that the Hindu number system was superior and should be adopted. Now he had come to court to convince the Ca*liph to change one central element of that system—the role of sifr.
Al-Khwarizmi reasoned that s lir had to be an actual number. Aziz countered that zero had always been just a placeholder, not a real number, and couldn't be changed now. The Caliph decided that if Al-Khwarizmi could show that sift acted like a number and could per*form all of the functions that numbers perforad then--and only then—he would decree that sifr was a number.
That meant that Al-Khwarizmi had to show that sifr t zero) could add and subtract. multiply and divide, be used as an algebraic exponent. and—like all numbers—be either odd or even.
Addition and subtraction was easy to show. 7 plus 0 equals 7. If you can do the addi*tion. then zero must be a number. Numbers can only he added to other numbers.
Multiplication and division were harder for Al- Khwarizmi to explain. He used piles of coins to demonstrate. To multiply one pile by four, he had to lay down four piles of coins. To multiply by two, he had to lay down only two piles. To multiply by zero. he had to lay down exactly no piles. Any number times zero is zero.
Al-Khwarizmi used the same piles of coins to demonstrate division by zero and using zero as an exponent (raising sonic number to the power of zero). At the end of two clays of questioning by the Caliph and by Aziz, Al-Khwarizmi had won. He had convinced the Ca*liph. who declared that sifr was a true number. The basic number system we still use and de*pend upon was complete.
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that's not how zero was invented, that's how AI-Khwarizmi convinced teh Caliph it is a number. Zero was inveneted long before.
Interesting story. To bad it doesn't say how exactly he demonstrated division by zero.
Considering what a genius this guy was, it must have been real smart.