In celebration of the children’s book author Peter H. Reynolds (the storyteller responsible for the great The Dot and Ish books, among others) I offer up here a link to my own series of posts on The History of Dots. There’s three or more dozen of them by now, forming a background to the story of dots, periods and points in mathematics, physics, chemistry, art and social history: there are posts on the the ends of a geometrical line, the homunucleus, bacterial and cellular dot events, mole maps, a dot as the picture of the speed of light, pointilism, half-tones, televisions, stars, the great confrontation of dots and spheres in the multi-dimensional fights of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and a bunch more.
There of course there is the History of Holes series, but that is another matter…