Zero -The Biography of a Dangerous Idea - Charles Seife
Summary
- A history of the use of zero as a number. Invented by the Babylonians, and developed by the Hindus, the fear of using it in the West held back Western scientific development
How I discovered it
- Recommended by good reads (I think!)
How the book changed me
- I never really had an appreciation for zero as much as I do know, and for how things that seem obvious to us now actually took millennia for humans to figure out
Details
- Archimedes was close to discovering the value of zero when he was murdered by a Roman soldier, consigning Western mathematics to darkness for 7 centuries
- Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) introduced indo-arabic numbers, including zero, to the West.