Analysis of Seife's Zero

A detailed Summary of Analysis of Seife's Zero

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

The Book I read was Charles Seife's "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea", which is centered around the number zero, but ends up explaining the history and evolution of mathematics as we know it today, the book starts explaining the dawn of mathematics when it was nothing more than a simple counting method man used to count their possessions, such as sheep. From the counting evolved number systems, which the book went into a good amount of detail to describe.

Man was believed to be counting as long as 30,000 years ago, when cavemen put notches into wolf bones to no doubt count their possessions, such as animals or stones, or whatever. The author states that since mathematics was used for little more than counting things, there was no need for zero, and therefore there was no zero. A quote from the book best describes this:

"The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilized of all the cardinals, its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought"

The book then explains how zero crept itself into most methods of

The book even has an amusing and thought provoking mathematical proof in the back that Winston Churchill was a carrot, all with tricky manipulations of the number 0. This made me think though. Ever since elementary school, I've simply been told that you can't divide by zero, it just can't happen. Then, almost 10 years later, I read this little book and I finally get somewhat of an understanding as to the why. You can't divide by 0 because division undoes a multiplication, for example 3/2 undoes the multiplication of 1.5 by 2, which is 3. Since any multiplication by 0 yields 0, if you undo and multiplication by 0, you can get anything. 1 / 0 can yield 1, since 1 * 0 = 0, but it could also equal any other number that you can create. That's why you can't divide by 0, it simply doesn't make any sense. This book was the first thing to open my eyes to this.

This book was also a good view at the conflict of ideas that occurred during the development of mathematics. Such as the Aristotelian view versus that of the infinite and the void, conflicts between Eastern and Western mathematics, as well as conflicts between Newton and Leibniz, whose ideas were pretty much the same yet different. On a side note, it was good to see that they struggled with the 0/0 problem with differentiation more than I did in calc 1! J

I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn the history of mathematics, or anyone who would like a new spin on the things they already know. This book may not do anything for some people, but for some it could shake the very foundations of the math and science that they've known for most of their lives.

mathematics, and the problems it caused, while throughout, stopping to explain how mathematics itself took the shape we all know today. It describes how the need for zero arose, mainly in the Babylonians

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1245
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English