ABSTRACT
The dimensionless point can generate, locate, orient, and punctuate both space and time. It can be a center, a focus, a vertex, an origin, an unknown. It is the most abstract of all geometric forms: it has no location, and yet is used to indicate location. Euclid defined it as "that which has no parts." Wassily Kandinsky held it to be "the highest and only link between silence and word."1 Itself ineffable, the point joins the ineffable to the effable. From its silence, invisibility, and indivisibility are extended letters, words, sentences, and texts. The point is the origin of language and thought. Bruno's entire philosophylike Dante's universe-hangs (pende and dipendé) on a point, on the notion of the minimum as that source from which all things physical, intellectual, and divine originate. Bruno's geometry is built on the mathematical point, from which all represented forms are born.
