<P> Zero was not treated as a number at that time, but as a "vacant position". Qín Jiǔsháo's 1247 Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections is the oldest surviving Chinese mathematical text using a round symbol for zero . Chinese authors had been familiar with the idea of negative numbers by the Han Dynasty (2nd century AD), as seen in The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, much earlier than the 15th century when they became well - established in Europe . </P> <P> Pingala (c. 3rd / 2nd century BC), a Sanskrit prosody scholar, used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables), a notation similar to Morse code . Pingala used the Sanskrit word śūnya explicitly to refer to zero . </P> <P> It was considered that the earliest text to use a decimal place - value system, including a zero, is the Lokavibhāga, a Jain text on cosmology surviving in a medieval Sanskrit translation of the Prakrit original, which is internally dated to AD 458 (Saka era 380). In this text, śūnya ("void, empty") is also used to refer to zero . </P> <P> A symbol for zero, a large dot likely to be the precursor of the still - current hollow symbol, is used throughout the Bakhshali manuscript, a practical manual on arithmetic for merchants, the date of which was uncertain . In 2017 three samples from the manuscript were shown by radiocarbon dating to come from three different centuries: from 224 - 383 AD, 680 - 779 AD, and 885 - 993 AD, making it the world's oldest recorded use of the zero symbol . It is not known how the birch bark fragments from different centuries that form the manuscript came to be packaged together . </P>

Who introduced a symbol for zero and when