The Indian mathematician Brahmagupta completed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta at Bhillamala in present-day Rajasthan, India. It gave the earliest known systematic rules for calculating with zero as a number, as well as rules involving negative quantities. These ideas later travelled through Islamic scholarship into Europe.

The mathematical zero entered wider intellectual culture as both a practical tool and a potent metaphor for absence, infinity and nothingness. Such concepts became important to philosophical and mystical poetry across Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and European traditions.