Is Zero a Number Or Something Added to the Number System As an Afterthought?
It is said that when the present number system was introduced, the symbol for zero was not even considered, so it did not exist. Most counting systems which emerged all over the world around that time also have no equivalent symbol for zero even today. In the stones systems, the zero issue did not arise because every stone had a one-to-one relationship with the object it represented; so the absence of any stones in the animal skin container meant that you did not have anything of that which was under consideration. But in the number system, a symbol could represent a single or more objects. It was felt that a symbol which stood for nothing was useless and therefore unnecessary. After hundreds of years, mathematicians were beginning to emerge from under every stone, like lizards, and many complicated theories of numbers were propounded in order to make the system more useful, but most of these theories were too difficult to understand. Their problems were understandable. It becomes clea
