(December 9, 2013 at 9:45 pm)Optimistic Mysanthrope Wrote: In the last 500 years? I'm pretty sure that zero is older than that
Quite a bit. The use of zero in a modern context goes back to at least the ninth century CE, and was used in Egyptian accounting (though, as I understand it, not quite in the same way we do) by the eighteenth century BCE.