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[–] 8 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Ante meridiem and post meridiem. Before and after noon. (Noon being true noon, when the sun is at it's highest point) Everything after 12:00 exactly is after noon and it makes more sense to change the notation there than 12:01.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    12 should be 0, 0:00 is noon and 0:01 the minute after.

    1:23 is 1•60+23 minutes after noon or midnight.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Without doing any further research, I bet it's a holdover from using Roman numerals (which has no 0) on clock faces.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    I recall 0 had a fear around it, in the same way as negative numbers and complex numbers. People didn't consider it real and refused to use it.

    Zero as a placeholder for arabic numbers was used long before people became comfortable with "a number without digits"; zero was just a placeholder, not a digit.

    I tried finding when zero as a number became used, but found that really hard since everyone instead talks about the digit/placeholder.
    Best I found is number.wiki which states India started using it as a number around 600. The introduction and popularization in europe around 12-1600 had it introduced as purely a placeholder though. "The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 ... any number may be written"

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