The Sumerians of 5,000 BC employed a positional system but without a 0. In some rudimentary form, a symbol or a space was used to distinguish between, for example, 204 and 20000004. But that symbol ...

For example, it led to the work of the seventh ... India, by adding zero to the positional number system, unleashed the true power of numbers, advancing mathematics from infancy to adolescence ...