THE mathematicians’ version of nothing is the empty set. This is a collection that doesn’t actually contain anything, such as my own collection of vintage Rolls-Royces. The empty set may seem a bit ...

When I was a child, a new way of teaching math was introduced and soon became popular. Often called the “new math”, this approach to math included an attempt to build up all of math from the concepts ...

This article is about nothing: nothing at all, as encapsulated in the number zero and the empty set. It took humanity millennia to move beyond the counting numbers. Zero emerged in several ...