I was never good at math. Even as a child, numbers felt cold, remote — the kind of language that belonged to other people - the smart ones. And yet, something about numbers fascinated me, not in how they worked, but in what they meant.

One idea haunted me early on: the idea of zero.

At five, I learned the basics easily enough. Three pencils plus three pencils: six.
Five pencils, one taken away: four. Simple arithmetic, visible, countable.
Dividing six pencils between two hands? Things get trickier. It made sense on paper, but in front of me, I still saw six pencils — just in two separate hands. My mind disagrees, yet still - I can learn to accept that the result is: three.

But then came multiplication. If I had three pencils in my hand and multiplied them by zero, the answer was supposed to be zero. And yet, the pencils were still right there in front of me. I could hold them, touch them, count them.

How could a number — an abstract idea — erase what was physically present? For years, this question quietly sat at the back of my mind. I didn’t yet have the words for it, but I was sensing that something didn’t quite (no pun intended) add up. Only much later would I learn that philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists have circled and analyzed this very concept for centuries — questioning whether zero is truly just emptiness, or something far more subtle.

In mathematics, zero stabilizes equations. In physics, it defines equilibrium. In music, silence shapes what we hear. In language, the pause between words gives meaning to speech. Even in Buddhist philosophy, śūnyatā — often translated as “emptiness” — is not a barren void, but the dynamic ground from which all form arises.

What we call “nothing” is often not an absence, but a field of possibility.
So when I look at those three pencils multiplied by zero, I no longer see contradiction or childhood confusion. I see something deeper. Zero does not erase the pencils — it transforms their status. It pulls them into a conceptual space where quantity no longer matters, where presence is held in tension with absence, and where potential quietly waits. We tend to think of zero as an end point — the bottom, the void, the failure.

But perhaps zero is really the threshold — the place where something can begin again. As a child, I thought I didn’t understand math. But now I wonder if math was trying to show me something about life: that what we dismiss as “nothing” is often the silent architecture of possibility.

So here I am, forty years later, still holding that thought. Still holding those pencils. Still standing at zero — where anything could happen.

Through high school, math remained a foreign language — a language only the smart people seemed able to speak. Zero was often the grade I’d get when I couldn’t answer anything. But my math professor was kind enough. “Pignoletti,” he’d say, “just write your first name on the paper — at least I’ll know you can write.”

Thank you, Professor Carlo - you were one of the very few.