Names for the number 0 in English the score was not placed upon a scoreboard, and there is scant evidence that the French ever used "l'oeuf" as the name for a zero score in the first place, that name being as anecdotal as the hypothesis that "love" is then derived from it. (Jacob Bernoulli, for example, in his "Letter to a Friend", used "à but" to describe the initial zero–zero score in court tennis, which in English is "love-all".) Some alternative hypotheses have similar problems. For example: The assertion that "love" comes from the Scots word "luff", meaning "nothing", falls at the first hurdle, because there is
Zero game piles or a Hackenbush diagram with nothing drawn on it. The Sprague–Grundy theorem applies to impartial games (in which each move may be played by either player) and asserts that every such game has an equivalent Sprague–Grundy value, a "nimber", which indicates the number of pieces in an equivalent position in the game of nim. All second-player win games have a Sprague–Grundy value of zero, though they may not be the zero game. For example, normal Nim with two identical piles (of any size) is not the zero game, but has value 0, since it is a second-player winning situation