The Raven and the Crow “Guess my fav’rite number?” said the Raven to the Crow. “Zero,” said the Raven straight, as if Crow couldn’t know. Startled first by such a claim, Crow paused but then said he, “Zero’s not a number, dunce, and never will it be!” Raven boasted, “I’ve caught thirteen bugs this very morn. “Crow, I see you’ve zero bugs,” regarding him with scorn. Crow confessed, “I’ve caught no bugs, as I have been asleep. “Yet I might as well have said that I’ve caught zero sheep! “Zero’s not a nat’ral thing to call a number, see!” “Yes,” quoth Raven, “but a number real it surely be” So, to tell the diff’rence ‘tween a raven and a crow? Ask its fav’rite number first, and then you’ll surely know. Copyright © June 2022, Alan John Branford
The most fundamental numbers of all are of course the counting numbers, the numbers we use to count or tally things. You can imagine, even back to Antiquity, the shepherd counting his sheep, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … Mathematicians call these the natural numbers. We tend to think that it is only natural to contemplate counting sheep if there are actually sheep there at all in the first place. It is thus an abstraction to introduce formally the notion of a number to represent the absence of sheep; this is the concept of zero. You can see the Crow’s point of view here. To talk about having zero sheep, you really should be in the business of counting sheep in the first place, otherwise it is a nonsense. Today, we tend to think of zero as just another number, as it were, but even as late as the sixteenth century, when great advances in Algebra were being made in the Italian School (mathematicians such as Scipione del Ferro (1465–1526), Niccolò Tartaglia (1500–1557), Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) and Lodovico Ferrari (1522–1565)), zero was still regarded by many mathematicians as something of a novelty and not a “proper number”. The great Hindu mathematical astronomers, such as Brahmagupta (598 CE – c. 665 CE), not only had a clear understanding of the use of a zero as a “vacancy” indicator in a positional number system (e.g., writing 30 instead of XXX), but also had rules governing arithmetic involving zero and even negative numbers. The The House of Wisdom, in Baghdad, established in the late eighth century CE during the second Islamic Caliphate, translated the Hindu texts into Arabic and generally extended algebraic understanding. It was thanks to the scholars of this Golden Age of Islamic Scholarship, particularly through The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, that the knowledge and wisdom of the East was disseminated to the West; from the Orient to the Occident. But, it was not until the late sixteenth century that scholars in the West broke free of the constraint of only positive numbers and liberated Mathematics from a geometry-centric basis. Thus, the Hindu scholars had made a significant something out of nothing that eluded Western scholars for a further thousand years! This poem was read to the March 2024 meeting of the Friendly Street Poets, Adelaide. (June 2022)
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Last Update: 11 November 2024