Analysis of Seife's Zero
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous IdeaThe 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
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. Pretty much the only thing they teach you in school that has anything to with Pythagoras is a2+b2 = c2. Then, almost 10 years later, I read this little book and I finally get somewhat of an understanding as to the why. Since zero represents nothingness, a complete void, and since you obviously can't take a ratio of nothing, the universe can't possibly be completely rational. This was mostly due to the fact that zero and the infinite destroyed the Aristotelian philosophy, and since the Christians went with Aristotle, zero didn't reappear until well after the dark ages, when the Muslims began to conquer much of Europe and Asia. Anyone who may not have learned the basic principles of quantum theory is given an excellent introduction that not only gives the reader enough knowledge to understand what the author is talking about and where it came from, but he also leaves it succinct enough so that it doesn't take anything from his original point. The author explains that if you divide by zero, you can mathematically prove anything in the universe. The book then takes time to describe how dangerous zero is. He cites one specific example of them actually killing someone because he let out the secret of the irrational, that is, something that can't be defined by ratios, like the diagonal of a perfect square. "Review I thought this book was an excellent, complex, yet easy to read look at mathematics and its applications to the entire universe. This book really made me stop reading and think about what was being said on a number of occasions. This arose the need for zero, but only as a placeholder, not as a number with its own value. The way this number system was set up, one symbol could mean many things.
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