NOTHING is more interesting than nothing, nothing is more puzzling than nothing, and nothing is more important than nothing. For mathematicians, nothing is one of their favourite topics, a veritable Pandora's box of curiosities and paradoxes. What lies at the heart of mathematics? You guessed it: nothing.
Word games like this are almost irresistible when you talk about nothing, but in the case of maths this is cheating slightly. What lies at the heart of maths is related to nothing, but isn't quite the same thing. "Nothing" iswell, nothing. A void. Total absence of thingness. Zero, however, is definitely a thing. It is a number. It is, in fact, the number you get when you count your oranges and you haven't got any. And zero has caused mathematicians more heartache, and given them more joy, than any other number.
The history of the origin of zero is, appropriately, almost nonexistent. ...
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