How did the ancient greeks distinguish between the number zero (omicron) and the number 70 (omicron)?
Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number: they asked themselves “How can nothing be something?”, leading to interesting philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero. (The ancient Greeks even questioned whether 1 was a number.)…. Omicron (upper case Ο, lower case ο, literally “small o”: o mikron, micron meaning ‘small’ in contrast to omega) is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 70. It is not used in mathematics because it is indistinguishable from the Latin letter O. Indeed, it is not widely used because of confusion with the digit 0.
