jan 1, 300 - *I: Earliest known use of 0 as a placeholder.

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India: The earliest known (?) use of zero as a decimal digit (in other words, a placeholder) is introduced by Indian mathematicians. The ancient Indian text called the Bakhshali manuscript consists of 70 leaves of birch bark filled with mathematics and text in the form of Sanskrit. Because of the methods used by Oxford University in the carbon dating, there is a great deal of controversy about the dating of this manuscript. Regardless of the dating, the Bakhshali manuscript is full of numbers expressed in decimal notation and even full of decimal calculations, and extremely rich in "0"s. For image of the manuscript pages, see http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2018-06

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