William Shakespeare was attracted to emptiness; His poetic intuition led him to predict the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum contained in atoms. Because Shakespeare’s nothingness, like the quantum vacuum, is not really empty. To put it scientifically: Shakespeare manages to make absence present in the wavering electromagnetic waves of his characters’ speech. And this is highlighted in the tragedy of King Lear.
“Nothing can come from nothing,” King Lear tells his daughter Cordelia, using a phrase attributed to Parmenides to point out a metaphysical principle that makes the word “nothing” a tense moment in the scene. At another point in the same play, the Fool asks King Lear: “Can you make something out of nothing, grandfather?” To which King Lear replies: “No, boy, you get nothing out of nothing.” And in another moment he says Jester to King Lear: “But now you are a bald nothing. I am more than you: I am a fool; “You are nothing” and thus identifies nothingness with the number zero.
The English mathematician Daniel Tammet (1979) devotes a chapter to Shakespeare in The Poetry of Numbers (Blackie), in which he tells us that both Shakespeare and his contemporaries “were among one of the first generations of English schoolchildren” who began to pose this Nothing with the letter O and give it the name “zero”. Given this understanding of arithmetic, Shakespeare used zero to represent the state of emptiness in which matter settles.
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In this way, thanks to zero, nothingness became tangible and useful even in life in uncertainty. The wordplay would be used to achieve a solid speech in which the complexity of the topic would be simply reflected in each line of dialogue when expressing categories such as age and King Lear’s delusions.
In Shakespeare’s time (1564-1616), Robert Recorde’s manual entitled “The Grounds of Arts” was used to learn arithmetic, the text of which refers to the format of a dialogue between student and teacher, thus facilitating the learning of arithmetic . Robert Recorde was born in Tenby in 1510 and died in King’s Bench Prison in London in 1558. In addition to being a mathematician, he was also a professor at Oxford and a doctor to the royal family. In the end, he was accused of non-payment by his political opponents and was unable to overcome the verdict.
But if there is one thing for which Recorde will go down in the history of mathematics, it is for inventing the equal sign (=). It appeared in his treatise The Whetstone of Witte, published a year before his death, and Recorde invented it “to avoid the tedious repetition of the words ‘is equal'” and in this very practical way “constituted a pair parallel or twin lines” from a width, because no two things can be more alike.” With this resolution, Recorde managed to create a universal symbol to indicate mathematical equality.
Let us now return to Shakespeare to end this play, because if the Swan of Avon identified himself with the void, it was for no other reason than the fascination that nothing had on him as he rebelled against himself and created matter, what they are made of: dreams.
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