What's the difference between zero and nothing?

Zero can be the numeric value 0, old Japanese plane, or location as in ground zero | zero point | surface zero.

Nothing is a concept that describes the absence of anything, void, non-existence, etc.

Zero is an empty value. Nothing is the absence of the value at all; null if you will.

Most mathematicians consider 0 to be a number, and "nothing" to be the empty set; they are related in that the empty set has zero elements in it; that is, the cardinality of the empty set is zero.

So basically "0" can be considered that there is some value there.

yes....0 is used to express "nothing" and "nothing" is... nothing

For example, it took nothing to ask this question!

Australian science fiction writer Sean McMullen addressed this question in his 2006 mathematical love story, The Measure of Eternity (Interzone #205). It is the third century, and all calculations are done with Roman numerals (which, of course, don't include a zero). A beggar sits in the market of the legendary city of Ubar, shouting "I have nothing!" He refuses charity and is able to make incredibly accurate predictions, such as tomorrow's probable market price for silk. Nobody makes the connection, until a beautiful, intelligent slave girl observes, "But you DO have some things. You have your clothes, your pot, your shoes. Do you mean to say that you have nothing in addition to everything else you have?" A wonderful, unforgettable story about the invention of zero.

'0' is a numeral signifying nothing.

0 is also a positional placeholder in the Hindu-Arabic number system, which facilitates arithmetic and accounting and makes higher order mathematics and thinking possible.

The Romans had no number for 0 nor any real conception of it. Columnar arithmetic is very difficult in Roman numbers, for instance, without a placeholder value of 0, or a number base system.

e.g.

209

+13

——

222

uses a 0 between the 2 and 9 as a positional placeholder in a decimal or base 10 system. The notion of 0 and negative numbers was not needed in primitive counting systems of goods, but became more useful as more sophisticated accounting requirements came along.

zero has a numerical value nothing is, for lack of a better term, nothing

Zero is the numerical value of 0. It IS something, but that something is nothing.

On the other hand, nothing is seen as a lack of anything, therefore an empty set (a 0 with a cross through it, or an empty set of brackets { })

Zero is both a number and the numerical digit used to represent that number in numerals. It plays a central role in mathematics as the additive identity of the integers, real numbers, and many other algebraic structures. As a digit, 0 is used as a placeholder in place value systems.

Nothing is a concept that describes the absence of anything. Colloquially, the concept is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimportant thing, event, or object. It is contrasted with something and everything. Nothingness is used more specifically as the state of nonexistence of everything.