Fake history tells us, that the Romans did not know the number zero. That tells me, that the Romans are totally fake. They had great engineers and catapults without knowing the number 0? You can tell that to some child in Kindergarten, but hey not to a self thinker.
Anatoli Timofejewitsch Fomenko, the great Russian mathematician, debunked Roman history 30 years ago and not only that.
Latin is a new language, developed for the Roman Church, not older than 300 years. In German it writes Lateinisch = late invented in Switzerland (Monastery of St. Gall). The whole grammar of " latin" is like German ( see Robert Baldauf). In St. Gall they found many copies of the so called Roman writers.
When we say the Romans didn't have zero what we mean is that in the Roman conception of math, the set of integers and the set of natural numbers are equal. They did not recognize the set as a line that was infinite in both directions.
That is exactly what I doubt. Everyone thinking mathematically will find that out easily. The Romans supposedly took everything from the Greek. So they did not know the zero either? But they could calculate Pi?
Yes.
You don't need any concept of negative to use Achimedes inscribed polygon method.
I think, you think, that when we say they had no concept of zero, that we mean the digit. No. We mean the point on the line, zero, where the continuum of numbers continues infinitely in the opposite direction. Without zero, numbers are a "ray", not a "line".
The DIGIT zero is just an artifact of our using the same glyph to indicate null in a place. You perceive 10 as two glyphs (one, zero) but this is just how our written language depicts them. The zero in ten and zero as a number are not the same.
If it sounds dumb, it's simply because it IS dumb. The persians didn't really strike on something revolutionary, you can get by perfectly fine without it in practical engineering applications provided you adjust things accordingly. It was much more of a "if we write it like this, then it works like this" "OH, yeah that is a bit more useful."
If they'd ACTUALLY been smart they would have also pushed base 12 instead of base 10.
Off topic but I’m curious what the technical advantage of base 12 over base10 is.
Because it's cleanly divisible by almost all the numbers smaller than its half.
Twelve divides by 1,2,3,4 and 6, only 5 is the oldball out. The practical applications of this is why bakers deal in dozens and the imperial foot had twelve inches, it's just really useful as a base because it's so divisible.
You can see vestiges of its influence in construction even today in dimensional lumber sizing combined with drywall. A standard studwall with sheetrock will come out as four inches thick.
Suppose that you live in 17th century England. You don't have a tape measure. Instead, what you might have is a piece of twine with knots tied into it that you sized up by holding it up to the Imperial foot standard (posted on the wall of Greenwich Observatory today although there used to be many of them scattered around the country). Because the foot is so divisible, you can arrive at 2,3,4, and 6" by simply folding the string. It won't be perfect, but it'll work good enough for the time for rough work like sewing or construction where the tolerances are less critical.