1. http://mags.acm.org/queue/200901/
This is a self-sighting from my Jan 2009 ACM column where I discuss VN’s “proof by rhyme.” It’s in para 2 which will spare you reading too many irrelevancies!
2. Current Sunday Times colour supplement: VN’s “Natasha” (first appearance in a UK publication)
The intro quotes Dmitri’s praise for this early sign of his father’s genius.
3. From Frank Kaplan’s wonderful but technically challenging THE NOTHING THAT IS – A Natural History of ZERO (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999 [so apologies if it’s already been noticed])
P 18: If you favor the explanation that the ‘0’ was devised by the Greeks without refereance to their alphabet, its arbitrariness is lessened by noticing how often nature supplies us with circular hollows, from an open mouth to the faintly outlined dark of the moon, from craters to wounds. “Skulls and seeds and all good things are round,” wrote Nabokov. However, the sign for zero evolved, there was always some sort of fancy bar over it ...
P 208: We have gotten all the rational numbers — and a knockout insight as well — from 0 to 1. But the question remains, could we get them all from zero solus? We could, were we able to make 0 yield 1, since then we would simply proceed as above. This was the dream of whatever monk it was who wrote the Salem Codex in the twelfth century:
Every number arises from One, and this in turn from Zero. In this lies a great and sacred mystery ... He creates all out of nothing, preserves and rules it: omnia ex nihilo creat, conservat et gubernat.
Now hold on just a damned minute, as Jimmie Stewart would have said. Adelard of Bath, you remember — also twelfth century — had a student N. O’Creat. But are we dealing, instead with some elaborate medieval joke here, a deep pun: the sorcerer’s apprentice nihilo creat turning into N. O’Creat? Was the spirit of Nabokov cavorting with Adelard of Bath?
... With a little ingenuity not God but we humans can do it [derive 1 from 0]
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Recalling VN’s statement quoted recently by Jansy that ONE is the only real number, and everything else comes from addition, you may see some contradictions afoot. Was Kaplan aware of VN’s assertion: VN the poet/wordmaster but not, on this occasion, the mathematician able to see the beauty of 0 playing the prime role he assigns to 1? Was VN aware of the Salem Codex? The irony will escape the many non-mathematicians on our list, I fear.
Stan Kelly-Bootle