Why Atheism?

[Cavebear]

Well, I disagree in concept, friendly.  Yes, zero is a numeral on our ordinate scale, thanks to the Asian Indians.  But it doesn't have an actual "value".  Approaching zero from 1 seems like infinity in reverse.  Numbers are quantities.  Zero is not a quantity.  So zero really means "nothing" in quantity.  It isn't "simply the lower limit of a range of numbers"; it is the lack of number.  You can have "one".  You can have less than one.  But I don't think you can have zero as a "quantity".  

I never thought I would be discussing "nothing" as a quantity, but there I go...  The concept of zero is very interesting.

You are conflating ordinality and cardinality.
Cardinality is quantity, so in simplest terms, the cardinality of zero is 'nothing'.
The ordinality of zero is the integer between -1 and 1, for example.

Well, actually "nothing" (a null value) as a "number" is a concept developed by the Asian Indians. From what I've read at various sites, no one had created a symbol for "nothing" before them. I can't find why the symbol for "nothing" was a circle. I might guess it represented an "empty hole" but that is sheer speculation. It would be interesting to know the origin of the symbol...

And where would we be without it? We would have to refer to some extremely wealthy people as multiples of "$999,999,999 plus $1". Very awkward at best. LOL!

Well, it beats Roman numerals. Just out of curiousity, is there even a Roman numeral representing "billion"?