You have a minority view on this argument, though. Scientific and structural realism both reject the idea that math is just a map. You've got company with the instrumentalists and antirealists, but the majority consensus is that math is somewhere between the structure underlying the territory to all the territory.
Zero was already part of the territory. Lack of something is a very normal state in the universe. Once we added it to our understanding of math, we were discovering it, not creating it. Of course people who are scientific or structural realists would agree it didn't change reality - because reality already had it, whether we knew it or not.
Zero was already part of the territory. Lack of something is a very normal state in the universe. Once we added it to our understanding of math, we were discovering it, not creating it. Of course people who are scientific or structural realists would agree it didn't change reality - because reality already had it, whether we knew it or not.