Here, count with me: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, T, 11, 12 … Oh, what’s that? You write ten with “zero”? Fair enough. Zero, we have been told, is the ...

I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real ...

If someone calls you a zero, you know it’s a diss without even having to think about it. You know right away that it means they think you’re nothing, smaller than any number. But humans aren’t the ...

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...

About 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...

Zero is a number. But unlike other numbers, zero represents not a thing, but an absence of a thing, or nothing. So understanding zero requires us to recognise the absence of something. From our ...