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 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' sexagemisal system. The way this number system was set up, one symbol could mean many things. One wedge could mean 1, 60, 3600, or and infinite amount of other things. This arose the need for zero, but only as a placeholder, not as a number with its own value. This satisfied people for a bit.
             The book then takes time to describe how dangerous zero is. The author explains that if you divide by zero, you can mathematically prove anything in the universe. It would destroy the fabric of logic. I personally d...

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