The achievement of the ancient Indians in the field of mathematics with special reference to the 'concept of zero,' forms the most astonishing event in the history of civilization. It is hoped that the present work would suffice to pinpoint in brief, the important features of the bright contribution made by the unknown Hindu scholar to whom, in fact, we must be ever grateful and politely bow before his extraordinary scholarship. While arriving at the 'concept of zero,' he might not have been aware that his invaluable piece of work is going to be revolutionary and that in future, it would be inevitable for tremendous development in the field of mathematics.
The author is pleased to handover this book, Concept of Zero to general readers who are curious to know more about zero. In fact, this book is an outcome of an offer made by the National Book Trust, India to the author. While writing the book, the author has taken a thorough survey of the deep historical efforts made by different ancient civilizations all over the world. Especially their primitive efforts of introducing various symbols for numbers, choice of the base number for a numeral system, aboriginal signs for zero, word numerals, expressions of large numbers in power of 10, all are neatly recorded by providing the evidences, wherever possible, to support the claims.
Apart from the exposition relevant to mathematics, use of zero in mathematics and its role in science, technology and of NBT Also, it covers technological aspect of zero where architectural ingenuity is concerned with the nucleus of daily life is taken care of, in accordance with the requirement garbhagriha of a temple, which is said to be at the zero point at which the deity is installed. In addition, cognizance is mosques or planetariums which consists of arches, in the taken of the domed roofs, may be of temples, churches, form of a hemisphere or segment of a sphere, essentially looking like arcs of a circle from a distance, apart from arcs used at various places including the top of windows.
The author has taken care to include fields other than mathematics in which zero has prominently appeared in philosophic and mystic areas like Buddhist Shunyavada, Nyayavishesika's abhava, zero in Dnyaneshwari, Patanjali Yog Darshan, Indian music, Shunya Kumbhaka, zero budget and so on. In short, all possible aspects of zero are mostly incorporated here.
The author is indebted to Dr Bal Phondke for suggesting his name for this job and NBT for readily agreeing his proposal.
The author is also grateful to Dr VN Patkar, Prof. Mohan Apte, Dr M G Nadkarni, who spared their precious time in reading the manuscript minutely and making valuable suggestions. Special mention must be made of Prof. Mohan Apte because of his advice to insert appropriate supplementary material at relevant places. It is admirable to keep on record the monotonous task of doing DTP of the manuscript by my granddaughter Isha Kulkarni. Due gratitude to my younger brother, Shri A P Deshpande, Hon. Secretary Marathi Vidnyan Parishad for providing relevant technological references from time-to-time and for informing slips and omissions occurred inadvertently.
Thanks are also due to Smt. Vijaya Rajdhan for reading the manuscript carefully through linguistic point of view.
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