The invention of zero and the perils of saying what can’t be said

Presenter: Bernie Lewin, Platonic Academy of Melbourne

| FREE PUBLIC LECTURE | DONATIONS ACCEPTED |

Zero is the signifier of nothing that makes “101” different from “11” by showing units and hundreds but no tens. With this marker for the empty place, mathematical calculations can be performed and recorded on the page. The Indian invention of “0” is now celebrated as “one of the greatest abstractions that the human mind has ever achieved.”

When "0" finally took hold in the West, it brought in train the very concept of nothingness. And fears of nothingness explain centuries of resistance to zero. The Christian horror vacui is traced back to the ancient Greeks, to Aristotle, to Plato, and even to Parmenides’s declaration that what-is-not cannot be said.

Today, the story of zero’s heroic triumph is embellished with such extraordinary claims. But what exactly is going on when something signifies nothing? Do fears of nothingness explain why merchants persisted with the abacus, where nothing signifies nothing? Perhaps zero is only an artifact of notational calculation, when, properly speaking, nothing should go unsaid?

With this third Timewell Lecture, no mathematical aptitude will be required to see how the modern celebration of the number “0” points to the confounding modern proclivity for saying what can’t be said.