Topic summary
Numeric
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Number.
Zero
The late Olmec people of south-central Mexico began to use a placeholder symbol for zero, a shell glyph, in the New World, by 38 BC. It would be the Maya who developed zero as a cardinal number, employing it in their numeral system and in the Maya calendar. Maya used a base 20 numerical system by combining a number of dots (base 5) with a number of bars (base 4). George I. Sánchez in 1961 reported a base 4, base 5 "finger" abacus.