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One remembers when Zero did not exist, when Zero was not a number. Zero, first in order, was the last of the arabic numbers to be invented.

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Zero opened the door to a whole host of imaginary numbers, abominations, radical rewritings of reality: the square root of negative one, for instance, or negative numbers. It all led to fractal geometry, nonlinear algebra, and the hegemony of chaos among the sciences of the enlightenment.

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Such possibility, such chaos, fills One both with fear and with fascination.

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