Our modern lives would not be possible without zero. Every computer literally runs on ones and zeroes. And it doesn’t seem to be that hard: Zero is a quantity. Easy, right?

Put a basket of apples in front of us, and you’d have no problem counting and reporting how many apples there are. And even if you gave away some, you’d have no problem reporting that either — you subtract the number of apples given away from how many there were before. If you keep subtracting apples, though, there’s a point where you will have an empty basket. Voila, zero. What’s so complicated about that?

Turns out, quite a few things.

The idea of a nothing, an absence, first appeared about 5000 years ago, where ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia used a slanted double wedge to indicate the absence of a number (like we write “101” to indicate there’s no digit in the tens column). It took until the 7th century, when  Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta described the rules for using zero in calculations (although he might not have been the first), and mathematicians there considered zero as a useful entity in its own. It took even longer, until the 1200s, until the concept even reached Europe, and until the 17th century until we arrive at what we would recognize as a modern understanding of zero.

So, zero as a concept does not come intuitively to us humans. In fact, if you test 4-year old children, they have no problem counting things, and telling you which card contains more dots than the other — until you introduce a card with no dots on it. Less than half of the children will give you the correct answer then. As it turns out, there are distinct psychological steps involved in understanding zero, and they are quite complicated. Zero does not come easy to us. In fact, if you repeat that experiment with adults, you can show that they take slightly longer whenever a card with no dots is involved.

Other interesting links from around the web:

• The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds — An interactive way to show how things spread in crowds
• Facebook-WhatsApp turmoil takeaway: Mark Zuckerberg can’t be trusted. — He made promises when purchasing WhatsApp he’s no longer keeping.
• How drug companies make you buy more medicine than you need — Hint: It has something to do with last week’s newsletter
• Blame Charles Mochet — Or, so many standards were set so long ago, we forgot why they are the way they are.

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