The story intersects with the lives of many famous mathematicians, but the obvious slimness of this book testifies that Seife managed to distill only what was necessary about their lives in his quest to explain the mystery of zero. What's admirable about Zero is Seife's ability to focus on zero. This one oversight overlooked, Zero is not your typical history book that starts in ancient Egypt or Greece and insists everything we know flows from there. That being said, I would have liked to learn about how China regarded zero, even if Chinese mathematicians contributed no new developments to the number's importance as their absence from this book seems to imply. Seife's history is necessarily balanced between East and West in this case, as it's impossible to discuss mathematics without discussing India.

In that respect, Zero acts as a history of the development of an idea, one that began in Babylonia and spread, via Alexander the Great, to India, where it flourished. Even with Charles Seife leading the way in the first chapter, I still have trouble comprehending this idea that entire civilizations rose and fell-and achieved great things in between-without the concept of a mathematical zero. It was especially difficult for me, as a mathematician who grew up learning calculus and understanding that zero is just another number. Imagining a world without zero is probably difficult for most people. Nevertheless, it stands up to a second reading and both inspires and informs. No longer the gullible high school student (now a gullible university student!), I'm apt to be more critical of Zero. Here I am, three years later, returning to Zero for a second read. My grade 11 math teacher gave this to me, and I remember reading it and loving it.

Zero by Charles Seife