SIFR

..... it all started in the year 773 when, at the end of an interminable journey, a caravan briging goods from India arrived at the gates of Madinad al Salam , the city of peace: Baghdad. Among the many chests full of presents for the caliph al- Mansur, one was destined to become fundamental for our entire culture: Siddantha, a treatise on astronomy, written one hundred years earlier by the mathematician Brahmagupta, The pages contained a fortune: ten figures! One of these was a new value: “zero”, called sanscrito sunya meaning “empty”. Sifr is the Arab name for zero, for “that nothing that makes all the difference”, and Sifr also became the name for all figures, as if to say that zero comprises them all and is greater than and cancels them all.