The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero - Hardcover

Kaplan, Robert

3.74

1,219 ratings by Goodreads

9780713992847: The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713992840 ISBN 13: 9780713992847

Publisher: Allen Lane, 1999

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Forced into our awareness 2500 years ago by the need to count ever larger multitudes, zero began its career as two wedges pushed into a wet lump of Sumerian clay. The subsequent history of the notion 'nothing' and its mathematical representative 0 was far from straightforward. Zero disappeared for centuries, then swept from the East into the medieval world with fears and superstitions crouched around it. Was it the devil's work? Did we discover or invent it? Is it a number or a fiction? Its users came to see that it held immense power to unriddle the universe. THE NOTHING THAT IS reveals how the gigantic body of mathematics swings on the smallest of pivots.

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Review:

On the face of it, the chances of a book about zero offering mind-stretching entertainment would seem to be about, well, zero. But in The Nothing That Is, Harvard University mathematician Robert Kaplan shows that there's a lot more to zero than meets the eye.

Unlike the so-called natural numbers like one, two, three and so on, the origins of zero are incredibly hard to pin down. Humans seem to have done quite well without nothing for tens of thousands of years: not even the Greeks, the master mathematicians of the Ancient World, had a symbol for zero. Or did they? Among the many delights of this book is the way Kaplan reveals the twists and turns in the story of the origin of the symbol for zero and his own suggested resolution of the mystery.

The struggle to do things with zero, such as divide it into other numbers, or use it as the ultimate fine-divider of other numbers--the key idea in the calculus--are brought alive by Kaplan, though without ever resorting to more than simple school algebra. His writing style does sometimes stray beyond the literary and into the florid but overall this compact little essay of history, mystery and maths should give you entertainment and mental stimulation in equal measure. --Robert Matthews

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