The Bakhshali Pakistan manuscript: The world's oldest zero?
October 26, 2017, University of Alberta
Last month, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University announced that a Sanskrit manuscript housed in the library for the last century had been dated using radiocarbon techniques. Oxford's radiocarbon dating laboratory announced that the three of the birch-bark folios of the Bakhshali Manuscript could be dated to roughly 300 CE, 700 CE and 900 CE.
The key result was, the library said, that one of the manuscript's leaves contained the oldest known written zero.
The library also announced that the zero in the manuscript was not a "true" zero, in the sense that it functioned only as a marker showing an empty decimal place, and not as a fully-fledged number that participates in calculations.
An international group of historians of Indian mathematics has now challenged Oxford's findings.
The team, which includes scholars from universities in the USA, France, Japan, New Zealand and the University of Alberta in Canada, has published a peer-reviewed article that refutes several of the Library's key assertions.
The scholars argue that the work written on the leaves of the Bakhshali manuscript is a unified treatise on arithmetic that must have been written at the time of the latest of the manuscript's leaves, not the earliest. The treatise shows no signs of being a jumble of fragments from different periods. Both the handwriting and the topic being discussed are continuous across the boundary of the first two dated leaves. It looks very much as if the scribe, who may have lived at the end of the eighth century, wrote out his treatise on a group of leaves that had been manufactured at very different times.
But of greater significance for the history of mathematics is the authors' evidence showing that the Bakhshali treatise does indeed know the "true" zero, and contains calculations like long multiplication that would have necessitated using zero as an arithmetical number. Furthermore, the treatise even contains a statement saying, "having added one to zero...," thus proving that the early Sanskrit author was thinking about zero in a numerical way.
The zero in the Bakhshali treatise is younger, but more important than Oxford claimed.
The international team ends its article with a plea to Oxford University's Library that important and complex scholarly topics should be published through established academic channels involving peer-review, and not through sensationalizing press releases to the media.
Explore further: Video: Earliest recorded use of zero is centuries older than first thought
More information: Dominik Wujastyk et al, The Bakhshālī Manuscript: A Response to the Bodleian Library's Radiocarbon Dating,
History of Science in South Asia (2017).
DOI: 10.18732/H2XT07
Provided by: University of Alberta 
Video: Earliest recorded use of zero is centuries older than first thought
September 15, 2017, University of Oxford
Earliest recorded use of zero is centuries older than first thought. Credit: University of Oxford
Scientists from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries have used carbon dating to trace the figure's origins to the famous ancient Indian scroll, the Bakhshali manuscript. The text dates back to the third or fourth century, making it the oldest recorded use of the symbol.
The research was commissioned by Bodleian Libraries, where the manuscript has been held since 1902. The text was found to contain hundreds of zeroes, and the landmark finding puts the birth of 'zero' or 'nought' as it is also known, at 500 years earlier than scholars first thought.
The concept of the symbol as we know and use it today, began as a simple dot, which was widely used as a 'placeholder' to represent orders of magnitude in the ancient Indian numbers system – for example 10s, 100s and 1000s. It features prominently in the Bakhshali manuscript, which is widely acknowledged as the oldest Indian mathematical text.
The earliest recorded example of the use of zero was previously believed to be a 9th century inscription of the symbol on the wall of a temple in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. The study findings predate this event and therefore have great historical mathematical significance.
Although a number of ancient cultures including the ancient Mayans and Babylonians also used the zero placeholder, the dot's use in the Bakhshali manuscript is the one that ultimately evolved into the symbol that we use today. India was also the place where the symbolic placeholder developed into a number in its own right, and the concept of the figure zero as it exists today, was born.
Credit: University of Oxford
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, said: "Today we take it for granted that the concept of zero is used across the globe and is a key building block of the digital world. But the creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics.
"We now know that it was as early as the 3rd century that mathematicians in India planted the seed of the idea that would later become so fundamental to the modern world. The findings show how vibrant mathematics have been in the Indian sub-continent for centuries."
The Bakhshali manuscript was found in 1881, buried in a field in what was then an Indian village called Bakhshali, now in Pakistan. It is broadly recognised as the oldest Indian mathematical text, however, the exact age of the text is widely contested. The most conclusive academic study on the subject, was conducted by Japanese scholar Dr Hayashi Takao, and, based on factors such as the style of writing and the literary and mathematical content, it asserted that it probably dated from between the 8th and the 12th century. The new carbon dating reveals that the reason why it was previously so difficult for scholars to pinpoint the Bakhshali manuscript's date is because the manuscript, which consists of 70 fragile leaves of birch bark, is in fact composed of material from at least three different periods.
Richard Ovenden, Bodley's Librarian, said: "Determining the date of the Bakhshali manuscript is of vital importance to the history of mathematics and the study of early South Asian culture and these surprising research results testify to the subcontinent's rich and longstanding scientific tradition. The project is an excellent example of the cutting-edge research conducted by the Bodleian's Heritage Science team, together with colleagues across Oxford University, which uncovers new information about the treasures in our collections to help inform scholarship across disciplines."
Explore further: Founding document of mathematics published in digital form for the first time
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-video-earliest-centuries-older-thought.html#jCp
