The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero - Tapa dura

Forced into our awareness 2500 years ago by the need to count ever larger multitudes, zero began its career as two wedges pushed into a wet lump of Sumerian clay. The subsequent history of the notion 'nothing' and its mathematical representative 0 was far from straightforward. Zero disappeared for centuries, then swept from the East into the medieval world with fears and superstitions crouched around it. Was it the devil's work? Did we discover or invent it? Is it a number or a fiction? Its users came to see that it held immense power to unriddle the universe. THE NOTHING THAT IS reveals how the gigantic body of mathematics swings on the smallest of pivots.

ROBERT KAPLAN has taught mathematics (most recently at Harvard University) to students from six to sixty. He has also taught Philosophy, Greek, German, Sanskrit and Inspired Guessing.