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Why there is no year ZERO

People might wonder why there is no year zero in our numbering scheme.

It has to do with the Latin term "Anno Domini" - "in the year of the Lord" (i.e. the year of the Lord's birth - the first year of the Lord's life). Year 2 is the second "year of the Lord" (i.e. the second year in the Lord's life) and so forth.

In the same way 1 B.C. "Before Christ" is the first year before the year of Christ's birth (the "year of the Lord").

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The real reason is because ancient mathematicians, and especially theologians, didn't know about "zero". It didn't exist yet.

Zero was probably invented (or discovered - depending on your philosophy) in India and didn't make it to Europe until about 1200 A.D.

Even then mathematicians argued as to whether zero was really a number or not. "How can nothing be something?".

After all you can add/subtract/multiply/divide any number by any other number and get another number - but you can't divide by zero - so it must not really be a number, right?

Ancient mathematicians used to believe that mathematics was tied to reality - (no modern mathematician would spew that sort of nonsense any more :-)


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Anyway, I think the REAL reason why there is no year zero is that there were no Software Engineers back then. (I wonder how they ever got by without us :-)

We love to start numbering at zero - in fact there's an old joke that Software Engineers don't know whether they have 9 fingers or 10 because they can't remember if they started counting at 0 or 1.

(I didn't say it was "funny" - I said it was "old"


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