A History of Pi
The magic of numbers is nothing new to the field of literature. Over the past two decades many popular books have explored the theme of immutable numbers and their special properties. A quarter of a century ago, the book "A History of Pi" took the nation by storm and mathematics became an interesting and publicly identifiable discipline rather than the realm of scientists. A newly published book on another mythical but immutable number has come to the national consciousness. Robert Kaplan's book "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero". The number zero has many properties that make it unique over any other number. Deep in the heart of elementary mathematics, this is a term that we all learn and it is left unchanged whatever it is added to or subtracted from. One of the advantages of Kaplan's book over his competitors is his rich understanding of the history behind the number zero and his ability to narrate his findings in an extremely interesting manner. He explains that the acceptance of zero as a fundamental number with an actual arithmetical value was not an easy road, and that in fact it we now take for granted the power of the number itself. He fully explores the historical, intellectual and cultural aspec
The evident truth about this book is that the number zero is not very interesting. Kaplan explains that the ideation of using only ten numbers to represent all arithmetic symbols was first developed in India before the 5th century. Hindu-Arabic number system changed arrhythmic on a worldwide scale and it is still the system that is in use today. The greater ability of Kaplan is to show the path of assimilation of the zero through the historical context. While Kaplan's account is very engaging in many ways, he also drags in many places. Part of the reason is that instead of this book being a study of mathematics, as I would expect it to be, it is instead a deep history lesson. Since the placement of zero within calculus was already established by the 19th century, this book is much less compelling in many ways than it could. The main problem with this book is that it lacks enough content at a fundamental level to write about, and as a result, much of this book is a deviation from the actual number itself into the implications of the number zero. In the tradition of most "history of science" books, Kaplan's book is one of the best, however the topic that he chose to cover does not nearly have the built in intrigue or any other aspect of dramatic tension that other mathematical symbols have. This conclusion, which seemed self-evident from the beginning, is stressed within every chapter, and Kaplan builds a very strong case centered on this concept. He also explains that gravity would never have been mathematically proven and the discipline of physics would not exist entirely. In sum, this book explains that zero is an elementary number that we always ignore in the annals of scientific history. Following his historical account of the number of zero, and the actual story of its development, Kaplan presents an interesting lure to novices of mathematics with the basic ideas of calculus. The discussion of binary numbers is also one of the ways that he uses to distract the reader and present the use of zero within our world. Although this aspect of the book is very entertaining, in many ways, Kaplan fails at his attempt to capture the philosophical struggle with the idea of zero.
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