I like zoom-out views. To push what you describe further, it is essentially what ancient humans or their non-hominid forebears did subconsciously when calculating optimum motion trajectories to catch or spear prey while hunting... merely a version in formal notation ... we can thank the zero of India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0#History), the Persians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm#Etymology), the Islamic renaissance in Europe (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/islamic-science-and-making-eu...) and numerous others for the slow development of the requisite formal maths. But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And perhaps, in the context of the stupefyingly deferred emergence of zero, even nameless!