“Zero emerges as a daunting intellectual riddle in this fascinating chronicle.

He writes with an understated charm that takes account of human fear, the mistakes of geniuses and the mind’s grandest ambitions.” “Mathematicians, contrary to popular misconception, are often the most lucid of writers (Bertrand Russell won a Nobel Prize not in mathematics but in literature), and Seife is a welcome example. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time: the quest for a theory of everything. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persists in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Here are the legendary thinkers-from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists-who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. In Zero, Science Journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. ' Zero is really something'-Washington Post Popular math at its most entertaining and enlightening.

Zero by Charles Seife