The Animator

Despite their repugnance at a vacuum, even Westerners would eventually accede to zero’s practicality. By the ninth century, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was using Hindu numerals, which were transmitted to Al-Andalus in the south of what is today Spain, where they then migrated into Latin Christendom, known forever as Arabic numbers. The Italian polymath Fibonacci, of the famed sequence, was responsible for popularizing Arabic numbers and zero, gushing in his Liber Abaci of 1201 that the “nine Indian figures are 987654321. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0, any number may be written.” A marked improvement over Roman numerals, zero and its nine siblings were a paradigm shift. Nothing, nil, nix, nada, zed, zero. Perhaps because of its similar pronunciation to the word for the mythic Western wind zephyr, Fibonacci used the Italian neologism zefiro, itself a bastardized translation of the Arabic sifr, which in an evocation of the endless, expansive eternity of the desert means “empty,” itself borrowed from the Sanskrit sunya or “void.” Even “empty” conveys something, but a void is the most abject darkness.

coverWhat makes zero fascinating—and troubling—is that despite its unsettling abstraction it’s extremely useful. Zero makes it possible to contemplate the deathless eternity of non-existence, as well as to make change at Starbucks. Robert Kaplan writes in The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero that the “disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things.” Numbers are the most elegant of objects, for only they remain true while being not real, none of them more so than zero itself. What that in turn forces us to confront is whether or not nothing can ever truly mean anything, or if a vibrant thisness must ever float back in, like the sound of crickets on an upstate New York evening.

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Critic James Fitzsimmons, appraising an exhibit

Despite their repugnance at a vacuum, even Westerners would eventually accede to zero’s practicality. By the ninth century, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was using Hindu numerals, which were transmitted to Al-Andalus in the south of what is today Spain, where they then migrated into Latin Christendom, known forever as Arabic numbers. The Italian polymath Fibonacci, of the famed sequence, was responsible for popularizing Arabic numbers and zero, gushing in his Liber Abaci of 1201 that the “nine Indian figures are 987654321. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0, any number may be written.” A marked improvement over Roman numerals, zero and its nine siblings were a paradigm shift. Nothing, nil, nix, nada, zed, zero. Perhaps because of its similar pronunciation to the word for the mythic Western wind zephyr, Fibonacci used the Italian neologism zefiro, itself a bastardized translation of the Arabic sifr, which in an evocation of the endless, expansive eternity of the desert means “empty,” itself borrowed from the Sanskrit sunya or “void.” Even “empty” conveys something, but a void is the most abject darkness.

coverWhat makes zero fascinating—and troubling—is that despite its unsettling abstraction it’s extremely useful. Zero makes it possible to contemplate the deathless eternity of non-existence, as well as to make change at Starbucks. Robert Kaplan writes in The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero that the “disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things.” Numbers are the most elegant of objects, for only they remain true while being not real, none of them more so than zero itself. What that in turn forces us to confront is whether or not nothing can ever truly mean anything, or if a vibrant thisness must ever float back in, like the sound of crickets on an upstate New York evening.

*

Critic James Fitzsimmons, appraising an exhibit

Despite their repugnance at a vacuum, even Westerners would eventually accede to zero’s practicality. By the ninth century, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was using Hindu numerals, which were transmitted to Al-Andalus in the south of what is today Spain, where they then migrated into Latin Christendom, known forever as Arabic numbers. The Italian polymath Fibonacci, of the famed sequence, was responsible for popularizing Arabic numbers and zero, gushing in his Liber Abaci of 1201 that the “nine Indian figures are 987654321. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0, any number may be written.” A marked improvement over Roman numerals, zero and its nine siblings were a paradigm shift. Nothing, nil, nix, nada, zed, zero. Perhaps because of its similar pronunciation to the word for the mythic Western wind zephyr, Fibonacci used the Italian neologism zefiro, itself a bastardized translation of the Arabic sifr, which in an evocation of the endless, expansive eternity of the desert means “empty,” itself borrowed from the Sanskrit sunya or “void.” Even “empty” conveys something, but a void is the most abject darkness.

coverWhat makes zero fascinating—and troubling—is that despite its unsettling abstraction it’s extremely useful. Zero makes it possible to contemplate the deathless eternity of non-existence, as well as to make change at Starbucks. Robert Kaplan writes in The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero that the “disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things.” Numbers are the most elegant of objects, for only they remain true while being not real, none of them more so than zero itself. What that in turn forces us to confront is whether or not nothing can ever truly mean anything, or if a vibrant thisness must ever float back in, like the sound of crickets on an upstate New York evening.

*

Critic James Fitzsimmons, appraising an exhibit