Please explain my confused me like I’m 5 (0r 4 or 6).
deleted by creator
Years are ordinal numbers, the kind of number that tells you which place you finished in a race, and as such cannot have zeroes or negatives. You’re living in the 2,024th year since the instant that began the Common Era. “0th” and “-1st” are not valid expressions for years for the same reason that you can’t place 0th in the Olympics
Programmer clutching their keyboards screaming “Arrays start at 0!”
When you consider the time as a number line, years are not points at integers (which would in some way warrant a year 0), but rather periods between them. Year 1 is the period between 0 and 1, and before that was -1 to 0, or year -1. There is no year 0, because there isn’t anything between 0 and 0
This explanation is unclear to me. Why do we choose the later of the two endpoints of the year for (0, 1) but the earlier of the two for (-1, 0)?
Because until the Middle Ages, Europeans were afraid of the number 0.
I’m no expert but I assume that the year Christ died would be “year zero” (assuming you’re talking about anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC)) since we started counting after that.
EDIT: reading more on the topic I might be completely incorrect with my above statement. If someone else knows, please do correct me
EDIT 2: I found this on Wikipedia which talks about a “year zero”
deleted by creator
