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Review
"Get this book. Read it. Think long and hard and sweetly about what the human mind is for: The gift of thinking, the joy and fulfillment of searching for the truth."--Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
"An attempt to do for Zero what Dava Sobel did for Longitude.... Kaplan has a light touch.... The effect is of a knowledgeable uncle suddenly prompted on a summer's afternoon to tell you all he knows on his favorite subject."--Jeremy Gray, The Sunday Times
"Where did the familiar hollow circle that we use to denote zero come from? That's a story fraught with mystery, and Mr. Kaplan tells it well.... Mr. Kaplan, a popularizer of mathematics who has taught at Harvard, is an erudite and often witty writer."--Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal
"Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is is a magnificent meditation on the concept of zero, and, therefore, on everything. His passionate writing brings us to the Mayans, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Arabs, and the early moderns as they worked towards, or from, an understanding of zero. Reading Kaplan, we experience that striving, and its glory, for ourselves."--Barry Mazur, Professor of Mathematics, Harvard University
"It is hard to imagine that an entertaining, informative book could be written about nothing, but Robert Kaplan has done it brilliantly. Starting with the great invention of zero as a place holder, Kaplan takes you through the use of zero in algebra, and in calculus where equating a derivative to zero magically calculates maxima and minima, to the importance of the null set. His book closes with that unthinkable question, Why is there something rather than nohting?' on which one cannot long meditate withoutfear of going mad."--Martin Gardner, former columnist for Scientific American and author of Relativity Simply Explained
"Get this book. Read it. Think long and hard and sweetly about what the human mind is for: The gift of thinking, the joy and fulfillment of searching for the truth."--Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
"An attempt to do for Zero what Dava Sobel did for Longitude.... Kaplan has a light touch.... The effect is of a knowledgeable uncle suddenly prompted on a summer's afternoon to tell you all he knows on his favorite subject."--Jeremy Gray, The Sunday Times
"Where did the familiar hollow circle that we use to denote zero come from? That's a story fraught with mystery, and Mr. Kaplan tells it well.... Mr. Kaplan, a popularizer of mathematics who has taught at Harvard, is an erudite and often witty writer."--Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal
"Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is is a magnificent meditation on the concept of zero, and, therefore, on everything. His passionate writing brings us to the Mayans, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Arabs, and the early moderns as they worked towards, or from, an understanding of zero. Reading Kaplan, we experience that striving, and its glory, for ourselves."--Barry Mazur, Professor of Mathematics, Harvard University
"It is hard to imagine that an entertaining, informative book could be written about nothing, but Robert Kaplan has done it brilliantly. Starting with the great invention of zero as a place holder, Kaplan takes you through the use of zero in algebra, and in calculus where equating a derivative to zero magically calculates maxima and minima, to the importance of the null set. His book closes with that unthinkable question, Why is there something rather than nohting?' on which one cannot long meditate withoutfear of going mad."--Martin Gardner, former columnist for Scientific American and author of Relativity Simply Explained
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Zero began its career as two wedges pressed into a wet lump of clay, in the days when a superb piece of mental engineering gave us the art of counting. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Zero began its career as two wedges pressed into a wet lump of clay, in the days when a superb piece of mental engineering gave us the art of counting. Read the first page
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Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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