Let’s Talk About Nothing

That’s right. Remember Jerry Seinfeld and the rest of that gang? They did a little show about nothing.

Sometimes no thing can be a really important thing.

Take zero, for instance.

What did zero do? It allowed regular procedures to be developed for adding, multiplying, division, and subtraction.

Let large numbers be written easily.

Permitted the development of the number line with positive and negative numbers. (Deacon, 2012)

Before the development of the symbol and the concept, you could talk...