Tianyi Ding in the JHI blog:
What is zero? A pure lack, a void, an absence; an empty hole on the page staring out like a hollowed eye; a wide-open mouth that spits out nothing in jarring silence. “The O without a figure,” as Shakespeare’s Fool tells Lear, zero is slippery to behold. The conventional story of zero treats the concept as ontologically prior to its symbolic and technical formulations: mathematicians conceived of nothingness, the story goes, and then invented a sign for it. Yet the concept of zero is inseparable from its technical forms, and to write its history is to trace how absence becomes visible and operational. A sign with no direct referent, legible only through the systems engineered to process it, zero is itself a technique of absence.
This essay traces the coming-into-being of zero through three material and technical formulations: the Arabic numeral zero as a semiotic sign for nothingness; the binary system first invented by Gottfried Leibniz, in which zero takes on relational rather than referential meaning; and the punched holes of the Hollerith card, which invert the very logic of presence and absence. Each instantiation does not represent absence so much as produce and handle it differently—as symbolic mark, as relational operator, and as material substrate. More broadly, my argument gestures toward a history of abstraction grounded not in ideality but in the material world—in the techniques that enact the very processes of conceptualization and abstraction. Zero is both the limit case of such a history and one of its sharpest vantage points, as material absence and symbolic presence constitute each other in their myriad formulations.
More here.
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