Names for the number 0 in English no authoritative evidence that there has ever been any such word in Scots in the first place. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word "love" in English to mean "zero" was to define how a game was to be played, rather than the score in the game itself. Gambling games could be played for stakes (money) or "for love (of the game)", i.e. for zero stakes. The first such recorded usage quoted in the OED was in 1678. The shift in meaning from "zero stakes" to "zero score" is not an enormous conceptual leap, and
Zero of a function a "zero locus". In analysis and geometry, any closed subset of formula_32 is the zero set of a smooth function defined on all of formula_32. This extends to any smooth manifold as a corollary of paracompactness. In differential geometry, zero sets are frequently used to define manifolds. An important special case is the case that formula_1 is a smooth function from formula_35 to formula_32. If zero is a regular value of formula_1, then the zero set of formula_1 is a smooth manifold of dimension formula_39 by the regular value theorem. For example, the unit formula_40-sphere in formula_41 is the zero