The Romans in their time conducted many wars. Their empire — spanning nearly 500 years or half a millennium, whichever sounds more awesome — was war-riven. They fought the Spartans, the Macedonians, the Galatians and, of course, the Gauls. If the Asterix comics are to be believed (and one shouldn’t bet too much on their veracity) it was the Gauls (thanks to Obelix and Asterix himself) that the Romans never succeeded in conquering. It’s probably why they’ve come to be know as the indomitable Gauls.

All that, though, is in the distant past. On this day, with a second millennium well under way, I find myself doing battle with the Romans once more. Not, you can be assured, with sword and armour but a more leisurely battle conducted across the wide open spaces of a circular formica top table whose only obstacles are two pillar-like takeaway mugs of coffee: One for me, the other for my adversary, my prankster mate, Barney.

And today, the Romans (represented by their champion general Barney) are conducting open warfare with the Indians (represented by yours truly). The battle, for those interested in knowing what its ultimate goal is ... well, this skirmish is being fought over nothing. Literally. Nothing? Really? An Indian would go to battle over nothing? Well, try telling him that by inventing the zero, the Indians really invented nothing.

It started off this way: Barney was working a crossword. One of the clues required the solver to change the word MILD to DILL. Barney shoved the newspaper across and asked me to observe the two words closely before revealing (what I had already figured out) that both words were composed using Roman numerals. I pretended to be staggered by his insight (something that Barney always relishes; he likes staggering people and I quite enjoy pretending to be staggered!) Anyhow, he then proceeded to ‘educate’ me on the fact that the Romans, in their counting, didn’t use a zero.

“There is no symbol for zero in their system and they had no use for it, Kevin. Their abacuses didn’t have provision for it and yet they managed fine with their counting.”

I refrained from reminding him that the Romans did have a word — nulla — which signified ‘nothing’. It is good strategy in battle, I have learnt mostly from crossing metaphorical swords with Barney so often, to keep some weaponry hidden for later use. There’s a lot to be gained from the aforementioned comics, pretending to be an emaciated, weak-looking Asterix while Barney, like an overconfident, bull-headed centurion charges in headfirst, brains several paces behind trying to catch up.

When he is done singing the praises of the Roman numerals and looks to me for some semblance of defence, I hit him with one word, a name: Brahmagupta.

“Who?” he asks, mock scornfully.

“Brahmagupta. Sixth century, Indian mathematician.” One of the first to give rules to computing with zero, he showed that zero was not just a place holder, but a number with unique properties. He showed that subtracting a number from itself would result in zero, or ‘shunya’. (We who know that today might well ask what’s so great about the discovery, but it changed the entire way numbers were computed.)

It is believed that from India, this little piece of nothing, or zero, made its way to China, then to the Middle East where the famed Arab mathematician Mohammad Ibn Mousa Al Khwarizmi showed how the zero could function in algebraic equations.

By the ninth century, the zero gained entry into the Arabic numeral system and attained its circular shape. It continued to migrate and it is believed reached Europe in the 1100s. In a twist of irony, the Roman thinker Fibonacci was one of the early Europeans, it is thought, to help introduce zero into the mainstream.

“Remove all the zeroes from the works of Descartes and Isaac Newton and you don’t remove ‘nothing’,” I tell Barney, “you remove something significant.”

Barney, to his credit, knows when to shut up.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.