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the solar year, this created a calendar round that had a different name for every day in a 52-year cycle.)

    Figure 3: Mayan numbers
    The Mayan system made more sense than the Western system does. Since the Western calendar was created at a time when there was no zero, we never see a day zero, or a year zero. This apparently insignificant omission caused a great deal of trouble; it kindled the controversy over the start of the millennium. The Mayans would never have argued about whether 2000 or 2001 was the first year in the twenty-first century. But it was not the Mayans who formed our calendar; it was the Egyptians and, later, the Romans. For this reason, we are stuck with a troublesome, zero-free calendar.
    The Egyptian civilization’s lack of zero was bad for the calendar and bad for the future of Western mathematics. In fact, Egyptian civilization was bad for math in more ways than one; it was not just the absence of a zero that caused future difficulties. The Egyptians had an extremely cumbersome way of handling fractions. They didn’t think of ¾ as a ratio of three to four as we do today; they saw it as the sum of ½ and ¼. With the sole exception of 2 / 3 , all Egyptian fractions were written as a sum of numbers in the form of 1/ n (where n is a counting number)—the so-called unit fractions. Long chains of these unit fractions made ratios extremely difficult to handle in the Egyptian (and Greek) number systems.
    Zero makes this cumbersome system obsolete. In the Babylonian system—with zero in it—it’s easy to write fractions. Just as we can write 0.5 for ½ and 0.75 for ¾, the Babylonians used the numbers 0;30 for ½ and 0;45 for ¾. (In fact, the Babylonian base-60 system is even better suited to writing down fractions than our modern-day base-10 system.)
    Unfortunately, the Greeks and Romans hated zero so much that they clung to their own Egyptian-like notation rather than convert to the Babylonian system, even though the Babylonian system was easier to use. For intricate calculations, like those needed to create astronomical tables, the Greek system was so cumbersome that the mathematicians converted the unit fractions to the Babylonian sexagesimal system, did the calculations, and then translated the answers back into the Greek style. They could have saved many time-consuming steps. (We all know how fun it is to convert fractions back and forth!) However, the Greeks so despised zero that they refused to admit it into their writings, even though they saw how useful it was. The reason: zero was dangerous.
    The Fearsome Properties of Nothing
    In earliest times did Ymir live: was nor sea nor land nor salty waves, neither earth was there nor upper heaven, but a gaping nothing, and green things nowhere.
    â€”T HE E LDER E DDA
    It is hard to imagine being afraid of a number. Yet zero was inexorably linked with the void—with nothing. There was a primal fear of void and chaos. There was also a fear of zero.
    Most ancient peoples believed that only emptiness and chaos were present before the universe came to be. The Greeks claimed that at first Darkness was the mother of all things, and from Darkness sprang Chaos. Darkness and Chaos then spawned the rest of creation. The Hebrew creation myths say that the earth was chaotic and void before God showered it with light and formed its features. (The Hebrew phrase is tohu v’bohu. Robert Graves linked these tohu to Tehomot, a primal Semitic dragon that was present at the birth of the universe and whose body became the sky and earth. Bohu was linked to Behomot, the famed Behemoth monster of Hebrew legend.) The older Hindu tradition tells of a creator who churns the butter of chaos into the earth, and the Norse myth tells a tale of an open void that gets covered with ice, and from the chaos caused by the mingling of fire and ice was born the primal Giant. Emptiness and disorder were the primeval, natural state of the cosmos, and