Popular math at its most entertaining and enlightening. "Zero is really something"-Washington Post A New York Times Notable Book. The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything. 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. 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. 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. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time: the quest for a theory of everything.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Biographies & Memoirs

Seife, Charles

Arts & Literature

Penguin Books

Science & Math

Mathematics

Viking

A "biography" of the most vexing and troublesome number in human history reveals how the Babylonians invented it, why the Greeks were afraid of it and the Hindus worshipped, the role it played in hunting down heretics in the Middle Ages, and its current place in the Y2K issue. Original.

History

Viking Adult

An examination of the most vexing and troublesome number in human history reveals how the Babylonians invented it, why the Greeks were afraid of it and the Hindus worshipped it, the role it played in hunting down heretics in the Middle Ages, and its place in the Y2K issue.

Publishing Mills

A "biography" of the most vexing and troublesome number in human history reveals how the Babylonians invented it, why the Greeks were afraid of it and the Hindus worshipped it, the role it played in hunting down heretics in the Middle Ages, and its placein the Y2K issue.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

New Millenium Audio

Zwilling der Unendlichkeit. Eine Biographie der Zahl Null.

Goldmann

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Books by Seife, Charles