90s (or earlier) short story concerning two mathematicians and "dark numbers"

Question

I think I read this short story 20, 30 years ago. The story concerns two mathematicians in a dark dystopian future. The one is struggling with some project, and can't figure out how to get the thing done; his friend gives him some advice, involving the use of the forbidden "dark numbers", which include such concepts as zero. No fantasy, I thought is was C.J. Cherryh but I can't find any hits there.

It's driving me nuts, what story was this?

I'm reasonably certain I read this in a collection of short stories, most likely bought from a second-hand book store.

The point of the story was a commentary on the rulers (government? religious?) who forbade the use of mathematics that would allow people to solve significant problems (think engineering and the like) -- not individual people, but rather society at large.

Answer 1

I wonder if this is "The Masters" collected in Ursula Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters?

• There are no "dark numbers", but there are "black numbers" (i.e. numbers represented using Arabic numerals) and zero is explicitly one of them. The society they live in uses numbers of course, but they are Roman numerals, and are hobbled by a lack of zero, negative numbers, very large numbers, etc.

• The dystopian nature of the setting is a post-apocalyptic anti-enlightenment agrarian non-industrial society.

• The primary characters are a Kabbalistic group of quite illegal engineers and mathematicians rediscovering measurement, algebra, etc.

Le Guin remarked in a brief comment preceding the story in the anthology that "The Masters" had been her first actual science fiction story.