Softcover edition
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Author | Charles Seife |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Zero, nothingness |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Published | February 7, 2000 |
Publisher | Viking Adult |
Media type | Print, e-book |
Pages | 256 pp. |
ISBN | |
Followed by | Alpha & Omega |
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is a book by American author and journalist Charles Seife. The book offers a comprehensive look at number 0 and its controversing role as one of the great paradoxes of human thought and history since its invention by the ancient Babylonians. Even though zero is a fundamental idea for the modern science, initially the notion of a complete absence got a largely negative, sometimes hostile, treatment by the Western world and Greco-Roman philosophy.Zero won 2001 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction Book.
Of course, Seife's book is not a typical biography. There are no tell-all interviews with the number one or any of zero's other neighbors on the number line... Seife's book begins--of course--at Chapter Zero, with a story of how only recently a divide by zero error in its control software brought the guided missile cruiser USS Yorktown grinding to a halt. As Seife relates, "Though it was armored against weapons, nobody had thought to defend the Yorktown from zero. It was a grave mistake." Maybe it's not the pulse-pounding drama of a Tom Clancy novel, but it's enough foreshadowing to launch Seife on an essay which begins with notches on a 30,000-year-old wolf bone and ends with the role of zero in black holes and the big bang.
—Mathematical Association of America