By PHIL PATTON Zero is having a rough year as we stare at the odometer, waiting for the century to roll over. The once happy go lucky donut has become a symbol of fear. Zero used to be fun, exciting, the edgy ring of the goose eggs the scorekeeper put up as the no-hitter drew to its conclusion, the happy lifesaver our mathematics sucked on. Now, Y2K has made it a tornado heading at the manufactured housing of our culture and symbolically turned the noble zero into the black hole into which the dying century darkly drains. In fact, we should be celebrating it. As the Nineties turn to the noughties the zero is the digit of the age--the dime on which the turn of the century turns. But has anyone appreciated how important it really is? Neither the Greeks nor Romans, amid such innovations as poetic catharsis, plane geometry and really cool siege engines, stumbled upon it. Since we adopted it from the Arabs, keepers of the flame of culture after left by the sacking of the library at Alexandria, it give us not only modern math and therefore modern physics and mechanics and such details of civilization as the sport utility vehicle and Toro lawn mower, but the whole binary thing. And the binary thing is the digital thing, the world all around us built of zero and one, off and on, nope and yep, yeses and noes by the million and billion represented in states of silicon. By extension, it gives us structuralism and spreadsheets. It’s the little ball bearing on which the entire machinery of Western culture has rolled since the Renaissance. Without it, you lose ground zero and zero hour. Without it, how much of the history of the Twentieth century would have to be omitted? Without zero, our rockets would never have completed their countdown and taken off for the moon. It’s the placeholder that holds things together, a heroic version of the orthodontic spacer, of the empty lot in the row of brownstones that is turned into a little garden. It gives us the infinitely thin line where water freezes---Celsius only, of course, since Fahrenheit wears its freeze up high like the pulled up waist of an old man’s pants. In his definitive book Number: A History of Mathematics, which Albert Einstein praised, Tobias Dantzig calls the development of the zero one of the most important events in western cultural history. The term and idea of zero comes from the Hindu surya, but it was also related to the Buddhist concept suryana, or the void, the state of nothing from which all things emerge and to which they return. Handed from language to language, rummaged from the ruins of various cultures and transmitted by invasion and the spice trade, it went form language to language to become Zephirium the zipher the cipher. The west by nature abhors a vacuum. The east understood it. Think of the zero as the eastern counterpoint to the oneness of the west with its monotheism, its nation states and its focus on the individual. It’s the main reason 2000 won’t be like 1000. The zero is not just the integer of the year, but that of the millennium. 
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