That Blankety Blank
Euclid and Pythagorus never even thought of it,
Perhaps not needing it for geometry;
So it was ‘Greek’ to them.
Aristotle was deathly afraid of it.
Even the word ‘naughty’ came from it.
‘0’ had a chilly reception everywhere,
It’s rounded symbol enclosing nothing,
As if it could be captured,
But ‘nothing’ never changed,
Being the same even if you took it away.
Humans stumbled on zero and nothing by accident,
And recoiled in horror, fearing it, reviling it,
And sometimes even banning it outright
As some kind of evil influence.
After many centuries, it seemed to be tamed,
Put in its place as a simple little placeholder.
Then the beast reared its ugly head for real,
Misbehaving like a monster right and left:
It brought instant death by multiplication,
And wrought total absurdity through division,
Yet stopping our expensive computers in their tracks.
It exploded into the ambiguous fog of infinity;
It ran away from us in calculus,
Sliding us down the slippery slope
Of closing in on it but never reaching it.
It spawned ghosts such as negative numbers,
Imaginaries, and those ephemeral infinitesimals.
Both the genie and the genius
Had been let out of the bottle,
And the goose egg still
Confounds and confuses,
No one knowing zilch about it,
Creating paradoxes left and right.