Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.” The post has almost 14 million views.
Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.” The post has almost 14 million views.
I want to correct something. They knew what nothing meant. They just didn’t conceptualize the absence of things as a number. And honestly, it’s a bit weird, but it is useful. You can’t have 0 apples, but the concept is useful for math.
Of course they knew what nothing meant. They even had a word for it: nullum. Sounds familiar, somehow. But the key is to apply this to math, and having an actual symbol for it.
I have 0 apples right now, and most of the time!
Arguably, sure. The way they’d understand it is you don’t have apples though, not that you have zero. With our understanding, it makes some sense, but I’d say even today that’s odd to say. It isn’t wrong, but it is strange to say you posses everything in the universe (and anything else too), just in quantities of zero. It makes more sense to say you don’t possess them.
It definitely makes sense in the same way that the famous experiment on abstract thought makes sense. Iirc, The experimenter a hundred years ago or more asked various people in different parts of Germany questions like, if a bird flies 20 miles an hour, about how long would it take to fly from Berlin to Frankfurt, and most people just couldn’t entertain the question and would say that makes no sense a bird would never fly between those places.
It’s only with our education system today that more people could entertain the question, how long a bird would take to fly from Frankfurt to Berlin, even if no real bird would ever do it, or not bat an eye at possessing everything in the universe in quantities of zero.