It is often the little things that are the basis of progress… So let me tell you a little story about the tiniest thing on earth: the dot.
Thousands of years ago, a man in his solitude scanned the night sky and saw all those dots shining like so many still fireflies and, perhaps for fun, he decided to join them together to form shapes. This is how zodiac signs and astronomy were born.
Far away, in ancient India, the dot symbolized beauty and the eye of knowledge. But even more, the dot they called “shunya-bindu” represented what we nowadays know as zero. It was first a placeholder and then a fully fledged number, for when it is added to the right of the representation of any given digit, the value of the digit is multiplied by ten. This is how our current numbers and decimal numeration system were born. Continue Reading
