A question of when and influence
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Throughout the 20th century, this ownership rested in India. That’s where an inscription was discovered, holding the number “0” in reference to land measurement inside a temple in the central Indian city of Gwalior. In 1883 the renowned German Indologist and philologist, Eugen Julius Theodor Hultzsch copied and translated the inscription into English, dating the text to the year C.E. 876. And this has been accepted as the oldest known date for the appearance of zero. However, a series of stones in what is now Sumatra, casts India’s ownership of nothingness in doubt, and several investigators agree that the first reference of zero was likely on a set of stones found on the island.
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