Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2008 September 11

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September 11

Origin Of The Concept Of Zero?

From my understanding, the concept of a zero has been conceived in many different cultures at different times, but the earliest known reference to the concept "zero" was from the Dogon Tribe of Mali (West Africa).

The term meant "dead" or "from dead", in context it meant "nothing", it was symbolised by a mark made by the thumb. It was later adopted by various middle eastern countries and the thumb print was replaced by the symbol we know today (0), as it was easier to write (it is still representative of a thumb print).

The term "dead on" (meaning on point) also has relations to the Dogon meaning of zero.

For some reason the knowledgeable minds of the world are reluctant to give any credit to sub-Saharan Africa for the intellectual development of mankind.

Intellegent people have lived in Africa from even before the dawn of civilisation (European standard), so it's not such a far stretch to think that most of the worlds inventions (like the 12 volt batteries found in Egypt) originated in Africa and have been copied, modified, or re-invented in many parts of the world.

Mankind is an intelligent creation. Worldwide, unrestricted from time and text.

Now your probably thinking "that's interesting, but where's the question know it all?"

Well here it is (they are);

I know that the Dogon Tribes "zero" pre-dates the other "zero's" but am not sure of the date it was first documented or concieved. This is why I am not updating the page in question.

Does anyone have info on this matter? and if so, why no mention of the "Dogons"

I know the Dogons did not date and time everthing they did, but they deserve a mention.

You will also find no reference to the "Phonicians" when it comes to "Phonetics" (also an African influence on the world) and many other subjects.

I generally find Wikipedia to be a good impartial source of information, but the problem of "crediting Africa" or "giving credit where credit is due" is very common, can this be fixed?

G.Logic —Preceding unsigned comment added by Godlogic (talk • contribs) 13:04, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

The word Phoenicia is unrelated to "phonetics", which comes from the Greek word for "sound" (like telephone, microphone, etc.). So I do not understand what connection between the Phoenicians and phonetics you are referring to.

The issue of a systemic western bias on Wikipedia is a serious issue: see Wikipedia:bias for information. However, I do not believe this particular matter you bring up is an example of that systemic bias. I haven't heard of a Dogon zero, and couldn't find mention of it with Google; from what I recall of the book "Zero: The biography of a dangerous idea", a history of the origin of the number, no mention was made of the Dogon tribes. An abstract concept like the use of zero as a number does not arise in isolation, but comes about from using numbers in a sufficiently abstract way to necessitate its invention; so I doubt the Dogons did, in fact, invent zero.

It would be helpful if you can provide any recollection of where you heard of this connection between the Dogon tribe and the number zero. I understand from what you say that you do not have an encyclopedic reference (and am grateful that you refrained from modifying the article for that reason), but even an uncyclopedic source of information would be of help in tracking down an encyclopedic source. Eric. 65.96.172.100 (talk) 14:58, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Followup to an earlier question

I have a quick followup to my original question. How would I go about determining the probability that an element is part of "Collection B" if it has the three most significant features, in this case Feature 1, Feature 2, and an absence of Feature 5 (with individual probabilities of 0.96±0.03, 0.88±0.04, and 0.66±0.08 respectively)? Many thanks for your help! But I Played One On TV (talk) 18:52, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Just treat the absence of a feature as a feature and you've got your original question. And as Bo Jacoby said in answer to the original question you have to start counting up the particular feature set rather than using the aggregated statistics as the various features may not be independent of each other, and the dependence may not show up until you put three or more features together - though that is luckily not very common. Dmcq (talk) 07:18, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

See [[1]] Bo Jacoby (talk) 08:35, 13 September 2008 (UTC).