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The Amazon Store at MillionDollarPetPix.com ( In association with Amazon.com )Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Ideaby: Charles Seife  List Price: $15.00 Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 809 EAN: 9780140296471 ISBN: 0140296476 Label: Penguin (Non-Classics) Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: September 01, 2000 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) Release Date: September 05, 2000 Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics) Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: The seemingly impossible Zen task--writing a book about nothing--has a loophole: people have been chatting, learning, and even fighting about nothing for millennia. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by noted science writer Charles Seife, starts with the story of a modern battleship stopped dead in the water by a loose zero, then rewinds back to several hundred years BCE. Some empty-headed genius improved the traditional Eastern counting methods immeasurably by adding zero as a placeholder, which allowed the genesis of our still-used decimal system. It's all been uphill from there, but Seife is enthusiastic about his subject; his synthesis of math, history, and anthropology seduces the reader into a new fascination with the most troubling number. Why did the Church reject the use of zero? How did mystics of all stripes get bent out of shape over it? Is it true that science as we know it depends on this mysterious round digit? Zero opens up these questions and lets us explore the answers and their ramifications for our oh-so-modern lives. Seife has fun with his format, too, starting with chapter 0 and finishing with an appendix titled "Make Your Own Wormhole Time Machine." (Warning: don't get your hopes up too much.) There are enough graphs and equations to scare off serious numerophobes, but the real story is in the interactions between artists, scientists, mathematicians, religious and political leaders, and the rest of us--it seems we really do have nothing in common. --Rob Lightner Product Description: A concise and appealing look at the strangest number in the universe and its continuing role as one of the great paradoxes of human thought The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now, as Y2K fever rages, it threatens a technological apocalypse. 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. Readers of Fermat's Enigma, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Seeing and Believing, and Longitudewill find the revealingly illustrated Zero freshly informative, easy to understand, and--infinitely--fascinating. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Seife Deciphers the CipherHere's a curious occurence. "The Indian name for zero is sunya, meaning "empty," which the Arabs turned into sifr. When some Western scholars described the new number to their colleagues, they turned sifr into a Latin-sounding word, yielding zephirus, which is the root of our word zero. Other Western mathematicians didn't change the word so heavily and called zero cifra, which became cipher." (p. 73). Now! - how coincidential or synchronicitous (you choose which) that the book about the Cipher ... Read More Rating:  - Starts Great, Doesn't Finish WellIn Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Seife first gives the history of the zero, in mathematics and social history, as well as it's non-history (why it was rejected in some cultures). He explains the resistance of the Greeks to the idea of the zero, why the Catholic Church rejected the zero and also how it was used in much earlier societies. These first chapters are well worth reading, blending history, math and mathematical history in a fascinating tale. From there, the author begins ... Read More Rating: - Where Music, Art, Science, Logic, Infinity, Notingness and Religion Become OneThis book can be read on two levels: 1) History, insight, personality and amusement or 2) technical terms and formula. Most of us will want to forget the second part and concentrate on the first part. Do that and this is a really good book. Read for the first reason, this is a fascinating, enjoyable, intriguing, informative, even useful read. Read how some of the great names in mathmatics, history, logic, even religion, lived and died, how the church killed people because they believed in zero, ... Read More Rating: - Nothing... Something to get excited aboutI'll admit, writing a book about nothing and making it exciting is probably a challenging thing to do. This is going to be a rather odd thing to bring up at the start of the review, but I have to ask did people read a different book than I did? Seriously, I read through just about every negative review and the points made against the book are barely in the book I read. If anything, they focus in on a minor detail, interpret it wrong, and then give the book a one star. I digress, let me get to the review and ... Read More Rating: - Not a math lover but I still enjoyed the book!The thing I liked most about Zero was the humor & sarcasm thrown in by the author. It breaks up the seriousness & complexity of some of the topics he covers & relates to zero (i.e. Calculus, Quantum Physics). Seife gave plenty of examples & metaphors to help the average joe understand the overall concepts. He also goes deeper for those readers that are math buffs. While the entire concept of zero/infinity is constantly repeated throughout the book, I like the way the book was organized: chonologically. ... Read More 
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