Smith honors Baghdad’s intellectual contribution to the establishment of zero as a number. Zero deserves her praise for its usefulness as a placeholder (as in the number 306), for its role as the additive identity element (if you add zero to any number, you get that number—in symbols, n + 0 = n for any number n), and for its contribution to the development of calculus. As the late writer David Foster Wallace elegantly claimed, “The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero.” Zero is a game-changer, a distinct value, and the barrier between positive and negative.
The richly informative book 100 Greatest Science Inventions of All Time tells the story of Al-Khwarizmi. In 810 A.D., this famous Baghdad mathematician convinced a group of fellow scholars that zero must be a number by demonstrating that zero behaves like a number when subject to common operations. Not only did Al-Khwarizmi thus effectively demonstrate zero as a number, but he also established himself as the founder of algebra.
I love this story because I think it eloquently demonstrates the following dispositi
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