Sometimes our experiences with objects or ideas leads us to assign them personalities -- a notion illustrated in the poem "Zero," by Sue Owen, a poem that lives on my shelf in the anthology Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics, edited by Kurt Brown (Milkweed Editions, 1998), and offered below.
Zero by Sue Owen
This is the story of zero,
born to live a life
of emptiness, only
child of plus and minus.
Its bones invisible
so it could be seen through
like an eye.
With that vision, you could