Is Zero a number or place holder? This problem with math that has been debated for centuries.

Show your work, give the histartical accounts in your answer, show proof.

Remember the Myans had the number ZERO and knew what its value Europians did not.

While your pondering your answer remember that computers can be reduced to this equation for everything it does, 'is the electricity on or off' a true bionary system of zeros and ones.

Have fun

River

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 26, 2012 3:24 pm Is Zero a number or place holder? This problem with math that has been debated for centuries.

Have fun

River

I believe the correct answer is yes.

Transward

Back many years ago (sometime around 1672) Otto von Guericke took a new thing called a vacuum pump and sucked the air out of two copper half-spheres. Thus prepared, the spheres could not be seperated by two teams of horses. Here is the engraving commemorating that event:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magde ... kugeln.jpg

A few years later when Robert Boyle explained this to Queen Elizabeth and displayed his work that resulted in the creation of steam engines (a very important part of the industrial revolution) she thanked him and explained that she had much heavy work to do that day and they were really discussing nothing...

And that is what it is all about. A vacuum, a zero, a nothing, THE NULL SET (the set that contains no elements).

A concept of wonder and at the same time -- nothing, nothing at all...

Does it really matter?

Zero serves some purposes,

including place holder and

as the number indicating none.

I also serves to complete

certain mathematical ideas, like

numbers raised to the power 0.

What would become of log 1 without

having 0.

What would curl grad V be.

Things might fly apart.

It depend;

Do you consider "negative one" a number, similar to a normal "one"

If Yes, then Yes.

Maybe.

And I expected this post to be about whether holding someone's place in line,

a place holder,

was a real job.

Electricity has both a positive and negative potential because there are electrons (negative) and something else that has lost electrons. Like for instance, lightning is the massive realignment of positive and negative charges. Halfway between the positive and the negative is zero. Not a place holder but a real potential that can be measured by a meter.

Zero is a number. In the decimal number system we commonly use, the position of a digit determines its meaning. If it is in the right-most position (for a whole number), it specifies the number of ones. If it's in the next position toward the left, it's the number of tens. If it's in the third position, it's the number of hundreds, and so on. So 352 means three hundreds plus 5 tens plus 2 ones. If one of the digits happens to be a zero, the meaning still follows the same rule: 400 means four hundreds, no tens and no ones. The zeroes are no more "place holders" than the 5 and 2 in 352.

Sandi

Your right Dave this is going to be a fun thread.

Zero is a number not a place holder.

Example:

Zero

------ = 3 DEGREES BELOW ZERO not 3 degrees below a place holder. now don't you feel silly.

BS

MBA

PHD

and no moi this is not aboud ron paul

River

zero defines a specific quantity. There is not a "place holder" that could take it's place, unless it describes the same exact quantity, in which case it would still be a specific number. A rose by any other name.

Elizabeth

Zero is of course a number, namely the number of items in the empty set. And without it functioning as a place holder our system of arithmetic would be impossible.. And that ignores its metaphysical implications representing that void state out of which the universe sprang,that dimensionless point that became the Big Bang... Then black holes and the big bang get their infinite density and gravity because the equations for both involve dividing by their radius which is approaching zero-

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