Word: zeros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Amazingly, there is. Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking) is the more accessible of the two. (The other book, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero [Oxford], while philosophically deeper, is self-consciously obscure; its author, Robert Kaplan, writes in Zen koans and could have penned the Fendi tag line...
Every schoolchild knows how "dangerous" zero can be. Just try dividing a number by zero and all hell breaks loose; indeed, zero was once scorned as the devil's work. It is such a familiar number today that it may be hard to believe there was a time--hundreds of years, actually--when our species counted and spoke but had no concept of zero. Seife and Kaplan both trace the history of naught, from its inception in Babylon around 300 B.C. through Athens, India and Europe later in the Middle Ages. It took Western mathematicians so long to accept zero...
Hoping to cash in further on math mania, this publishing season brings not one but two books about zero. You have to admire the publishers for starting at the beginning of the number line--and setting themselves up for infinitely many predictable sequels--but is there really that much to say about nothing...
...Freud could have said, sometimes a zero is just a zero and not infused with deeper meaning. What could be more transparent (even to the mathematically challenged) than the fact that 4-4=0? Zero is the definite answer to countless other such equations. Zero, though, can also be a tease, something that is sought after but always just beyond reach. Take the physicist's concept of absolute zero, the absurdly chilly -459.67[degrees]F. This would be the temperature of an object so still that even its subatomic particles ceased to jiggle. But modern physics teaches that the subatomic...
...possible the millennium is fizzing because everyone just realized this isn't really the end of the millennium. As any math nerd can eagerly tell you, there was no year zero, therefore the next century doesn't technically start until...