Sunday, March 10, 2013

Brahmagupta's use of Zero as a number in Mathematics

Question:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130302012000AA7BSTi

Do current mathematicians correctly understand Brahmagupta's use of Zero as a number in Mathematics?

The natural numbers are the quantities that we now denote by 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., i.e. they are the non-negative whole numbers. (The modern procedure is to include 0 in this list, which is an appropriate thing to do from the mathematical point of view, although the ancient Greeks appear not to have recognized ‘zero’ as an actual number. This had to wait for the Hindu mathematicians of India, starting with Brahmagupta in 7th century and followed up by Mahavira and Bhaskara in the 9th and 12th century, respectively.)
~The road to reality-Roger Penrose-pg92


Brahmagupta (597–668 AD) was the first to use zero as a number.
He gave rules to compute with zero. Brahmagupta used negative numbers and zero for computing.
The modern rule that two negative numbers multiplied together equals a positive number first appears in Brahmasputa siddhanta.
As no proofs are given, it is not known how Brahmagupta's mathematics was derived.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmagupta

Additional Details

If current mathematicians correctly understand 'zero', what is the value of 'zero divided by zero'?
The result is a value and not undefinable.

@Mathmom,
0/0 is neither undefined nor indeterminate in Mathematics. It has a value.
I can see that so called mathematician in the west do not know what they are doing with mathematics.
This is a matter of knowledge and I do not mean any personal criticism and/or insult.

@Lincoln Lad,
Racist issue is your narrowed opinion, not mine.
My point here is an established fact that concepts like zero and infinity are not deep rooted in western thinking. Therefore, the products of such an infant system only can guess on zero and infinity, without knowing what pioneers have done.
Zero and infinity are so important that they can even shake the whole universe! Not bluffing here.

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