Before you read any of this, understand this is hard to put into words for I am trying to define something without a reference to itself

The history of mathematics and physics and religion and astronomy and astrology is the truth of two primal ideas being added to a known mean.

Either you can do "Any" with anything being put in a container as in A like the variable A and anything can be put into A

And you describe the world with the word A and not A.

So before you read anything else understand there is A and there is not A in mathematics, aka Truth and Not Truth but Not Truth does not tell you anything about Truth just that it (it being Non Truth) is not the same as Truth, but it does not explain why it is not the same.

For example the word Null which means 0 in modern English (but wait there are other words for Zero besides Null which I will get to). Null comes from the German word / word Null which means Zero.

It can also be traced back to the Latin and it means Not Any with Null the english word being the french word Nul which is derived from the latin word Nullus which is latin compound word. The roots of this compound word is the root Ne which in latin means Not and the root ūllus which means One and this ūllus can be traced back to PIE (proto indo european) where the word ullus came from the word ūnus.

Side point,

(This probably sounds like nonsense to you for I am skipping steps, but it has to do with stuff that is hard to put into language and be objective. So lets use a subjective sense, you know the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade how do you spell the name of God, well in Latin that is older than 500 years ago you had I and no J symbol and thus Jehovah was spelled with a J in modern languages but in ancient languages that are latin based you used the I symbol for J was not invented yet. It was invented to help make it simpler to tell in writting should a sound with the I symbol have a Jehova with the Jeh sound being closer to the Y constant. Note Y when it sounds like a vowel will not sound like a J but instead sound like a hard I or an I sound that sounds like ie. Blah what I am saying all these rules of grammar and pronunciation have to do with Proto Latin, Proto Germanic, Proto Greek languages and what separates these languages.)

So Zero as the concept Null means very different than Zero as the concept as in Circle. Zero as the concept lacking is another thing similar to Zero as the concept Null and Zero as the concept Circle.

And once we created understand the concept Null and Circle and the concept Lacking as distinct categories mathematics took a huge advance roughly 1450 to 1650 and really the big advancements were 1500 to 1600 years ago. Now you can trace the concept of Zero as in circle earlier than 1450 perhaps to 1202 to fibonanci the famous italian who has a very important number sequence : 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377. (note whether you start the fibonanci sequence with 0 or 1 is kind of the point of this post but also other stuff with addition and multiplication and so on.)

What happened is we imported the word Cypher into the Latin alphabet from the Arabic alphabet. Zero gets its name from Cipher (modern english) and Cypher (Older english) which gets it from french cyfre similar words were also imported into other romantic / latin based languages and cyfre in french is the importing of the arabic word صِفْر (ṣifr, “zero, empty”) which in turn is a variant of the arabic word صِفْر صَفَرَ (ṣafara, “to be empty”) noticed the accent marks ar ein different places with صِفْر and صَفَرَ .

Note there are similar concepts in other Proto Indo European languages that are similar to that arabic word. I can't remember the word just that it starts with a S symbol in english but I can't remember the symbol in hindi and I can't remember the exact sound and thus I can't tell you if it was Sa or Sh or S like in SSS or S like in ha and ta. (Is getting frustrated with myself) but Zero in hindi is related to wheel but also the concept of arc in wheel and the concept of wheel as in zero as a container.

So what I am saying Zero is not just an arabic concept related to the word cypher but it is also related to the hindi concept of wheel, and the concept of stuff we later quantified with letters being knowns and unknowns (Viete) and Descarte being who does A, B, C for known letters and X, Y, Z for unknown letters, and from Rene Descarte we get calculus with Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and Issac Newton is also famous for his works in Physics.

But once you start treating Zero as different things, for example it can be Null as it is or it is not or it can be Cypher as in Circle or that Zero can be within or not within you start simplifying but also making mathmatics and physics far more complicated.

It allows you to united Algebra and also Geometry, it allows you the necessary concepts to start doing Calculus and Physics and now represent complicated things in the Physical and Environmental World aka the world of the concrete and then describe it in the world of the Ideas and the world of the Abstract which is different than the concrete world and the abstract / mathematical world.

There is a reason Rene Descartes besides being the famous guy who sets up the system of rules that will one day be calculus is also famous for cartesian split with which we get the duality of mind and body principle in philosophy but also those fancy optical illusions where you see the black and see the white and now can see both but also cartesian coordinates (x, y axis in math, x, y, z axis in math). Descartes is known to be the father of modern philosophy not just for his math and science stuff but also for the stuff that then sets up non religious ways of talking about philosophy in a western context.

Aka we have the greeks prior to Plato / Aristotle, than the Hellenstic and subsequent Roman people which happen after Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and then the Stuff after the forming of the modern church and the fall of the city of Rome in 476 AD, and then a 1000 years later whatever inflection point you pick which is the concept of Zero, or Descartes and his work, Newton and his work, or Hobbes and his work, and so on.

So once we started doing this giving multiple meanings of Zero and understand that the meanings were not synonymous in the 1500s mathematics and science took over and became far more complicated and far more precise and far more useful.

I know there is several books on this subject and I am asking which one you recommend to read for finding the different ways to say Zero as a number with a definite value vs saying abstract language like Null or it is a place holder and such has a lot of meaning for it can be an intersection point and blah blah blah.

For example these Two books that came out in 2000 deal with the same concept but which one would you recommend?

Charles Seife (author, year released 2000)
Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (title of the book)

and

Robert Kaplan (author, year released 2000)
The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (title of the book)

But there are far more books on this subject than these two. This is because before the history of Zero in the 1500s we were describing it with different words for all of written history stuff like the Greeks and so on. It allows the unification of ideas. For example can you describe God as 2 things A or not A or do you need to describe God as a Trinity A B and then the intersection of A and B. Aka Two lines and the Intersection point or two points and the line that connects them in the shortest point.

Why does all of this matter? Well whether you can define things as 2 numbers / variables or 3 numbers / variables allows you to create bounded conditions and the smaller you make bounded conditions the more usefulness and utility you can get with the smaller amount of words and the harder you can do science for you can create Falsifiable Premises, aka we can test for stuff with the scientific method. Effectively Zero as a concept that can be Null vs Circle vs 0 the mathematical number allows you to do matrixes that are small or matrixes that are big.

Before 1500 we did things like astrological symbols, or describe god as god in three people, and so on and so on, like what is the form of the Good in Philebus, is it A, not A, mixed states, and then another form of mixed states which is the cause of the mixed states (aka recreating the mixed states what is the Origin or where will it end up to). Aka we can break the universe down into 4 elements but these are not the same 4 elements that he uses in other Plato works are also known as the Platonic Solids (or Plato's 5 elements which he introduced in Timaeus) which is connected to the elements with Earth was associated with the 6 sided cube, Air with the 8 sided octahedron, water with the 20 sided icosahedron, and fire with the 4 sided tetrahedron. Later on Aristotle plato's student associated Aether / Ether with the 12 sided regular dodecahedron.

One way of talking about why sometimes Descartes is the father of modern western philosophical thought is he separated the concept of what can be known (what is the bounded condition) and what is the area of metaphysics (what is outside the bounds) by separating these two you are removing religion from philosophy for when you are talking metaphysics you are effectively talking religion, but when you are talking what can be known you are doing a different branch of philosophy, a branch that is scientific and falsifiable.

So since I have not read either book I mentioned above, and there are a lot more books on this, does anybody here on RAFO have any recommendations? Oh here is a scientific american article on this subject but it is very basic and does not have any real advice.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/history-of-zero/