Brahmagupta

 The Ancient Greeks had a problem with representing zero.  They understood the concept, but philosophically and religiously had issues with it.  They questioned, “how can nothing be something?”  This philosophical paradox lead many Greeks to not supporting the idea of representing zero as an actual value.  Then in 130 AD Ptolemy used a symbol for zero in his work Almagest, which was on mathematical astronomy.  This was called the Hellenistic zero and was used by itself, not just a placeholder.  This zero, however, was not used in arithmetic and other areas of mathematics like it is today.  
To find a zero that is more common to the uses of today we need to look into 7th century India.  Before zero became used as an integer, arithmetic was struggling.  Some problems that faced everyday life were much more difficult to calculate.  Indians were using words to describe “nothing” such as “void”, “sky”, and “space” (translated into English).  Then in 628 AD the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta came up with a solution.  He introduced a set of rules for this nothing number.  He described it as, “when zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged.  A number multiplied by zero becomes zero”.  This was the first concrete application of zero as a number and not as a place holder.  Brahmagupta did make a mistake though.  He thought that one divided by zero would produce zero.  
Brahmagupta was also a savvy business man.  He went with this concept of zero and came up with what he called “debt”, which he described as the opposite of property.  With this concept of debt he thought up what we would call now as negative numbers.  Before this idea, there was no way to subtract a larger number from a smaller number.  The thought was that this would produce a meaningless value or at best nothing.  Brahmagupta’s idea of debt gave him more insight to things such as subtracting a debt from zero will produce a fortune, or a positive value.  Brahmagupta’s work with zero also lead him to discover that quadratic equations had two solutions, which also lead to Brahmagupta looking at quadratic equations with multiple variables.

This is my banana cream pie recipe.

This was a tricky one, I've been working on it on and off for about a year and could never seem to get it where I wanted it. After trying out tons of bananas, my first hit was with TFA Banana Cream. If this flavor was stronger, my banana quest would be over, but it took many failed attempts with crap banana flavorings to get it right. Finally, recently I picked up LA Banana Cream. While I think TFA is better overall, LA adds what TFA is missing on its own.
I wanted to focus on the filling of the pie with this recipe more than the crust, so I added some heavy hitter creams like FLV Cream and CAP Vanilla Custard. Had I stopped here the pie would have been a lot thicker, like a custard or pudding. That's where the CAP Vanilla Whipped Cream comes in, to help lighten up the creams and create more of a cream pie feel. Lastly was the crust. I wanted a light graham crust to keep the focus on the filling. So I went with TFA Graham Cracker clear, INW Biscuit, and a touch of FA Almond to create a nice bright crust.