Book: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
The daily public transit commute gives me a lot of time to read these days. I
haven’t posted about every book I’ve read and some I’m going to wait and do
a author-based post. Occasionally I run out of books in my stack (although
I just alleviated that problem for hopefully a few months) and my roommate
Keith is kind enough to throw a book my way that he isn’t yet reading. The
last one he did that for was the book
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife.
At first I thought it might be an odd book considering the subject matter, but
I shouldn’t have feared as Seife is quite capable of guiding the reader
and filling in the holes in knowledge they have. While it is hard for a
modern person to conceive of a world without zero the history and reasoning
that it didn’t exist in the ancient world are clearly laid out.
From ancient times through the invention and adoption of zero Seife explains
why it has been both a benefit and a detriment to cultures, science, and
mathematics. From the Greeks banning zero to how the numeral systems of the
world developed (ancient and modern) and how that affected the perceptions
of the users (for example, in Greek and Roman counting systems there was no
notion of zero because they always compounded the numbers from left to right).
There are many subjects in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and
each and every one of them is clearly explained and linked to zero. From
basic math, through algebra and calculus, and into physics zero is explained,
de-mystified, and accounted for. Zero was a quick read (thankfully it’s
not too thick and dry) and very enjoyable. I would highly recommend it for
anyone, especially my nerd friends.
