Date: Sun, 05 Dec 1999 01:20:58 -0600 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net> To: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org>, dg@root.com Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: So, what do we call the 00's? Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.19991205012058.0097b100@mail85.pair.com> In-Reply-To: <199912040742.AAA62858@panzer.kdm.org> References: <199912040737.XAA08969@implode.root.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 00:42 04-12-1999 -0700, Kenneth D. Merry wrote: >The calendar skips from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. There's no zero year. So the >year before the first full year A.D. was 1 B.C. > >Although it is roughly based on the birth of Christ, for whatever reason >they decided to start numbering at 1 instead of 0. I believe the reason was that the mathematical significance of 0 was not discovered yet. Back then, a year 0 would have been an absurdity. They did not even have a Roman numeral for 0. Zero was not a number, it was the lack of a number. It signified non-existence. In the minds of the people of that era a year 0 simply could not exist. Not just era, but place too. The situation could have been different in other parts of the world, for example in India they developed the concept of 0, and a digit for it, long before. Cheers, Adam To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3.0.6.32.19991205012058.0097b100>