Naught

Naught had felt like a nothing his whole small life. So this idea landed deep in his heart.

He learned that long ago, in India, mathematicians did a bold and beautiful thing. They gave nothing a name and a number: zero. A scholar named Brahmagupta even wrote down rules for it — how to add it, how to subtract it, what it meant. Nothing became a something you could work with.

And far across the world, with no way to have heard of India at all, the Maya people did it too, entirely on their own. They needed a zero for their great calendar, and they made one — a little shell-shaped mark — because they, too, had discovered that an empty place must be named.

Naught thought about this for many quiet days. Two peoples, oceans apart, both bold enough to give nothing a name. It made him feel, for the first time, that being small and easily-overlooked was not the same as being unimportant. Nothing, it turned out, was worth naming. And so, perhaps, was he.

When he was older, Naught made his slow way to the MathLore hall, where they gather the stories of how math grew. They had been hoping for someone who could tell the story of zero.

He teaches the children the power of the empty place.

"Try to write one hundred and five without me," he says. The children write 1 and 5. "Now read it." They read fifteen, and laugh, and see the problem. "The tens place is empty. But 'empty' still has to be shown." He slides a 0 into the gap. 105. "There. Now the 1 knows it's a hundred, because zero is holding the tens place open. Zero doesn't count anything itself. It holds the places, so all the other numbers know where they stand."

"So zero is like a placeholder," a girl says.

"A placeholder, and more," says Naught. "It took bold people — in India, and among the Maya — to look at nothing and decide it deserved a name. Before zero, big sums were a nightmare. After zero, they became easy. The whole world does math the smoother way now, because someone was brave enough to name the empty place."