The Story of 0
Rick N. Blake, Charles Verhille · for the learning of mathematics · 1985
The comments noted above display the language used to convey some of the common misconceptions about zero. This paper is about the language of zero. The initial two sections deal with both the spoken and written symbols used to convey the concepts of zero. Yet these alone leave much of the story untold. The sections on computational algorithms and the exceptional behaviour of zero illustrate much language of and about zero. The final section of the story reveals that much of the language of zero has a considerable historical evolution; the language about zero is a reflection of man's historical difficulty with this concept.