Is Zero Really a Number or Just a Concept? Date: 09/15/2005 at
20:24:42 From: Swapnil Subject: Zero: Just a concept like
infinity? Hi, for a long time my teachers have hammered into my
brain that infinity is not a number, it's just a concept. Now
that I understand that, I wonder if zero is just a concept too?
I guess this is both a philosophical and a mathematical
question. Philosophically, you can't really have a zero of
things, because the thing which is zero doesn't really exist. In
fact, if you do count things that don't really exist, you will
have an infinite number of those things since there is no limit
to things that you can imagine existing (which is rather an
interesting fact). In mathematics, many definitions and rules go
haywire when they try to deal with zero (such as 0^0, 1/0, 0/0).
The two most used bounds for evaluating the limit of a function
are in fact 0 and infinity. So it seems obvious that there is a
deep intricate relation between zero and infinity. And like
infinity, it seems that zero