Writings
Woo, yayayayyy! Etc
mind you, I still need to do the Postsecret stuff, although I lost my original so I'll have to go choose another one at random and write about it.
KES CWC is coming to an end as well - I now have no place left where I can read out dramatic things to my heart's content! oh noes!!
Anyway, here you are. It's creative writing. About maths.
3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6
2! = 2 x 1 = 2
1! = 1 =1
0! = 1
Sophia thought it was ludicrous. Others may have found the word a bit melodramatic, but Sophia didn't give a damn. Ludicrous was exactly the right word for nought factorial, (ludicrous: meriting derisive laughter or scorn as absurdly inept, false, or foolish) tenuous and hot and slippery on a plane that was entirely factual. The laws of mathematics were not eel-fish-slippy ideas that trickled through the fingers of your mind, they were solid. Dependable. Sophia knew the world of numbers and vectors inside out, could run a mile with tangents and trigonometry and the two possible solutions of the quadratic equation; she could just about grasp the concept of i (i: the square root of negative one), but she couldn't pin down why nought factorial was one. Why it was a tangible, substantial unit rather than nothing. How was it possible? She'd seen all the proofs, to be sure, and at one point or another had actually comprehended them. But no matter how many times she bludgeoned Kemp's ideas into her despairing head, they soon lost their lucidity (lucid: suffused with light; clear to the understanding). How could anyone arrive at the conclusion that nought, zero, nil, nothing could spawn a quantifiable value?
But zero itself was an anomaly she could properly appreciate. (Zero: the arithmetical symbol 0 or 0̸ denoting the absence of all magnitude or quantity; a state of total absence or neutrality) The absence of all magnitude and quantity, the great void in a whorl of quantities; whilst everything in the numeric spectrum measured and gauged, defined, tracked and calculated, zero was the singularity that remained apart and neutral. Essential to the entirety because before the concept of zero, the world of mathematics was pitiably small and zero provided grounding and an origin (origin: rise, beginning, or derivation from a source). Yes, zero was the source and the start, the field that begat the forest, it was no thing and yet every thing, and in those lucid moments, serene in a pool of numbers, the fractured whole, Sophia quietly thanked it for being there.
