NARRATOR: As far as we know, prehistoric people only had 3 numbers.
PRE-HISTORIC MAN: 1…2…err…lots…
NARRATOR: But by the time of Ancient Egypt, things were a bit more complicated than that.
EGYPTIAN: One thousand and four, one thousand and five…
NARRATOR: Though writing numbers was still tricky…
EGYPTIAN: I need another one!
NARRATOR: …and doing big sums needed a lot of space.
The Romans came up with a slightly better system, but writing a simple number like 88 took a lot of time…LXXXVIII!
But things really changed about 2000 years ago when someone in India had a great idea…
I have made a very important invention! It is…
Nothing!
The idea of zero.
The idea of zero, along with some symbols for 1 to 9, meant that any number at all could be written easily, and that meant that it was much easier to learn complicated sums, and that meant that people could start working out all sorts of difficult things, like navigating across the oceans, building amazing structures and demolishing them. Thanks to advanced maths, we even got into space.
The idea of zero was first thought of around 2000 years ago. Using zero made writing numbers and doing calculations easy. This meant people could do more complicated maths and this led to loads of new inventions.
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