system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is the advent of the number 0 a big deal in mathematical history?

Based on a recent post, I saw that it is apparently a "big deal" that mathematicians started using the number zero. To me it seems that even during a hunter gatherer society someone would have asked how many blueberries another dude picked, and that guy would say 0, because he didn't find any...
gpt
> To me it seems that even during a hunter gatherer society someone would have asked how many blueberries another dude picked, and that guy would say 0, because he didn't find any...

That's kinda it. They didn't say they had zero of something. They said they didn't have that something. There's a subtle difference there, where you treat the zero of something as categorically different situation than some positive number of something.

Ancient Greeks debated this, and they ended up concluding pretty much this. And for the most part, to them, this was just a philosophical question. It really didn't have any real effect to their lives if zero was considered a number or not. The great things happened when you got 0 introduced into a positional number system(which Greeks didn't have), like the one we use, where 10 for example has one of tens, and zero of ones. People had used positional number systems before, but without number zero, and as a result, they could not tell apart numbers like 1,000 and 100 because there was just blank space signifying none of that position.

Basically, it's difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary the number system we now take for granted really is, and how powerful it is in its ability to represent all numbers using just a couple of different symbols.