Zero (Sanskrit: Shunya)
Why does zero look like a zero? How do you come up and describe a concept as something..that isn’t there?
First invented in ancient India, far away from mathematics, Shunya as a word describes everything and nothing at the same time.
The way people represented is that they took a little piece of nothing and drew a circle round it which turns the nothing into something.
This idea of eternity and continuity and infinity is actually contained with the numeral for zero. But how can that be?
Which brings me to this great Austrian mathematician: Kurt Gödel. In 1930, he got interested in paradoxes, such as:
This statement is a lie.
If it is true, it is false. And if it is false, it is true.
Gödel thought, forget words, what would happen if I converted this statement to math. Because in math, things are either provable or unprovable.
And in the end, he came up with this incompleteness theorem:
It said that if you have a system of axioms that don’t contradict themselves, they’re necessarily incomplete. That is, there are certain statements you can make within that system that you can’t prove or disprove.
In simple words, there is a gap between truth and proof.
It makes you wonder, how nothing can be everything! Shunya. A truth that cannot be proven.
