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The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero
 
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The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero (Hardcover)

by Robert Kaplan (Author)
2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
On the face of it, the chances of a book about zero offering mind-stretching entertainment would seem to be about, well, zero. But in The Nothing That Is, Harvard University mathematician Robert Kaplan shows that there's a lot more to zero than meets the eye.

Unlike the so-called natural numbers like one, two, three and so on, the origins of zero are incredibly hard to pin down. Humans seem to have done quite well without nothing for tens of thousands of years: not even the Greeks, the master mathematicians of the Ancient World, had a symbol for zero. Or did they? Among the many delights of this book is the way Kaplan reveals the twists and turns in the story of the origin of the symbol for zero and his own suggested resolution of the mystery.

The struggle to do things with zero, such as divide it into other numbers, or use it as the ultimate fine-divider of other numbers--the key idea in the calculus--are brought alive by Kaplan, though without ever resorting to more than simple school algebra. His writing style does sometimes stray beyond the literary and into the florid but overall this compact little essay of history, mystery and maths should give you entertainment and mental stimulation in equal measure. --Robert Matthews

Product Description
In this text, Robert Kaplan explores the peculiar course that the notion of "nothing" or its mathematical representative, zero, has taken throughout history. Forced into our awareness 4000 years ago by the need to count ever larger multitudes, zero drifted in and out of focus, disappeared for centuries, then swept from the East into the medieval world, with fears and superstitions crouched around it. Did we discover or invent it? Was it the devil's work? Is it a number or a fiction? Its users came to see that it held immense power to unriddle the universe, leading to profound insights into the mind and the world. And now new layers are coming to light: our computers speak only in zeros and ones, and, for a cosmologist, zero alone can be made to generate everything.

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (4)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.5 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Unnecessary waffle obscures any interesting information, 30 Dec 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero (Paperback)
I just want to add my voice to those who thought that this book was full of too much flowery language. If you have the time and patience to wade through the pseudo-intellectual claptrap there is some interesting information hidden in this book. Unfortunately I found it all too annoying.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Unfortunately Amazon can't handle 'Zero' stars., 1 Jan 2000
By A Customer
Maths can be a difficult subject to understand, even when presented in clear and simple language. This book constantly distracts the readers attention with flowery and unnecessary prose. The really annoying thing is that having read some sentences a number of times you realise that behind the verbosity, Kaplan is actually saying something very mundane. An example:

"But when it comes to the pedestrian matter of dating such stories or tracing their antecedants, we must give it up. An attitude more poetic than ours toward when events occured, and toward the events themselves, makes hazy chronicles of these distant times"

Could easily have been written as:

"The passage of time makes it impossible to know how reliable such stories are."

There are many fine books which make mathematics accessible to the casual reader. This book is not one of them.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Kaplan must be a botanist, 14 Sep 2001
By Dr. Mark Hudson (Reading, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Nothing That is: A Natural History of Zero (Paperback)
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments of those who thought this book was far too flowery. There were a lot of interesting parts to it and I found the historical passages rather informative; but when he starts introducing ludicrously overblown paragraphs which you just wade and wade through without finding out why he wrote them, it gets rather tedious.

If this book had been a little shorter, it would have been much better.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars A book about nothing
You don't have to know anything about mathematics to enjoy this book but just a lot about everything else. Read more
Published on 19 May 2001

4.0 out of 5 stars Even Vogon poetry has it's fans.
It's an intersting subject.

It's a well written book, some of the words are not ones which I use every day, but I was once taught how to use a dictionary, so that is not a... Read more

Published on 9 Jan 2001

1.0 out of 5 stars a new age hippy-dippy trip to nowhere
You can almost smell the joss sticks as you are reading this one! The author roams all over the place whilst fruitlessly conjecturing on what might have been 100s or 1000s of... Read more
Published on 25 May 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars I Highly recommend this book by Robert Kaplan
In the first chapter Robert Kaplan eloquently traces the first beginnings of "zero" with absolute crystal clarity.
Published on 17 Jan 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful book about the coneptual development of zero
What a wonderful book.

In tracing the historical development of the concept 'zero', Kaplan touches upon the deepest intellectual currents of the western intellectual and... Read more

Published on 16 Jan 2000 by kanku

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