—TOBIAS DANZIG, NUMBER: THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE. You'll never forget the Pythagorean theorem again!”—Scientific American. Ordered from The Book Depository (as usual) and the packaging and delivery were all satisfactory. Focusing on both foundational debates and practical use numbers, and showing how the story of numbers is intimately linked to that of the idea of equation, this book provides a valuable insight to numbers for undergraduate students, teachers, engineers, professional mathematicians, and anyone with an interest in the history of mathematics. The Egyptians had an extremely cumbersome way of handling fractions. Zero was a digit, not a number. © 2008-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Zero was at the heart of the battle between East and West. . A single stone in the first column is easy to distinguish from a single stone in the second column. And like the Babylonians, they needed a zero to keep track of what each digit meant. Along with this solar calendar, there was a ritual calendar that had 20 weeks, each of 13 days. (The Hebrew phrase is tohu v’bohu. This was, in part, because the Egyptians were of a practical bent. When the Yorktown’s computer system tried to divide by zero, 80,000 horsepower instantly became worthless. (We all know how fun it is to convert fractions back and forth!) Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2018. No Kindle device required. They are a fundamental pillar of our modern society, and accepted and used with hardly a second thought. An Eastern concept, born in the Fertile Crescent a few centuries before the birth of Christ, zero not only evoked images of a primal void, it also had dangerous mathematical properties. It was before the beginning of history, so paleontologists have had to piece together the tale of the birth of mathematics from bits of stone and bone. Download one of the Free Kindle apps to start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, and computer. . Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea -~=Zero: The Biography … Instead of “We have zero bananas,” the grocer says, “We have no bananas.” You don’t have to have a number to express the lack of something, and it didn’t occur to anybody to assign a symbol to the absence of objects. Scientists--including galaxy hunters and microwave eavesdroppers, gravity theorists and atom smashers, all of whom are on the trail of dark matter, dark energy, and the growing inhabitants of the particle zoo-now know how the universe will end and are on the brink of understanding its beginning. It looks suspiciously as if Gog was counting by fives, and then tallied groups in bunches of five. He presents an overview of how numbers were handled and conceived in classical Greek mathematics, in the mathematics of Islam, in European mathematics of the middle ages and the Renaissance, during the scientific revolution, all the way through to the mathematics of the 18th to the early 20th century. Where? Anything times zero is zero, so all the tick marks are at zero. Haven't read it all yet, but so far it's pretty good. . . He recreates the baffling mathematical problems that conjured it up, and the colorful characters who tried to solve them. It was a grave mistake. Highly recommend! shifts smoothly from history and philosophy to science and technology, and his prose displays a gift for making complex ideas clear.”, “Seife keeps the tone as light as his subject matter is deep. M (mu) stood for myriori: 10,000—the myriad, the biggest grouping in the Greek system. Simply being able to count was considered a talent as mystical and arcane as casting spells and calling the gods by name. There was no way to express any quantities other than one and many. However, none of these systems had a name for zero. ... Un très bon résumé de l'évolution du nombre zéro. Such challenges offer a tantalizing glimpse of the field's unlimited potential, and keep mathematicians looking toward the horizons of intellectual possibility. This apparently insignificant omission caused a great deal of trouble; it kindled the controversy over the start of the millennium. Yet despite the Egyptians’ brilliant geometric work, zero was nowhere to be found within Egypt. A lot of tough ideas (including Cantor's infinities) are well described and interesting. However, Gog preferred to count in groups of five rather than four, and people all over the world shared Gog’s preference. Instead of using the moon to keep track of the passage of time, the Egyptians used the sun, just as most nations do today.