Rating: 
Summary: Distracting, confusing, bloated
Review: This book's discussion of the development of the zero-containing Arabic numeral system and the calculus are valuable examinations of modern mathematics and its sources. Too bad the reader has to wade through so much distraction to get to these nuggets of knowledge. The pages of this book are filled with strange non-sequiturs and philosophical wanderings that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. "Zero" also has a questionable, at best, sense of humor (did we really need so much detail on Martin Luther's constipation?). And the last third of the book, covering applications, physics and cosmology, should have been left out entirely-- it's confusing, incoherent and totally out of place in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Read before Studying
Review: I wish I had read this book before I studied the Calculus. It certainly doesn't pretend to tell you how to do the calculations but it is a wonderful guide as to why you are doing them. In a subject where the details can be overwhelming, it can give you some understanding of where you are going. A beginning mathematics student could do much worse than read this book before starting to study.
Rating: 
Summary: An intriguing idea
Review: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is a book based on an intriguing idea, the history of zero. It's
something that most of us don't often contemplate. Some of us may know that zero, at least as a place holder,
was invented/discovered by the Mayans, but beyond that most of us haven't a clue. At least I hadn't. Charles Seife begins his discourse with the earliest history of numbers. Counted things first appear in the
archaeological record as marks on bones in the the stone age. Early civilizations had little use for a concept
of zero; one rarely counts no apples or no sheep, etc. Ancient Egyptian mathematics seems to have been limited to measuring land areas and calendaric time for which zero in their method was unnecessary. In fact, it is the early calendar's persistent lack of zero in day and year counting that led to the confusion over when the 21st century started. The Babylonians likewise used
math for celestial observation and calendars, but they also introduced zero as a place holder which simplified the writing of numbers and doing simple arithmetic. It is among the Greek philosophers that Seife sees an outright distaste for the concept of zero as nothing, a void. It conflicted with their particular notions of the universe and how it operated. Their aversion to it seems to have
carried over into the Mediaeval European period by way of the offended established principles of the church.
Seife follows the history of zero to modern times and discusses some of the ways that zero and infinity are
the same and some of the ways that they oppose one another. He brings both quantum mechanics and relativity theory into the discussion, revealing some of the ways that looking at zero and infinity have led to advances in physics in more recent times. The author is a science writer with an MS in mathematics. As a journalist his style is both enjoyable and readable, making a complex subject more accessible to the average individual--that is, he doesn't bog one down with a lot of complicated equations. I'm no math wiz by any means, but I understood his thesis in its
entirety. Those who've studied math in greater depth may find the book a little patronizing or at least a little too heavy on the verbal form and a little too light on the math.
Rating: 
Summary: Seriously flawed
Review: Quite a few books recently have chosen the history of zero and the vacuum as their subject, and Seife's book is the clunker of the group. He has the dubious honor of bringing a tabloid style to math writing; his pages are replete with hyberbole and lame puns, as well as sometimes potty-mouthed in-jokes about mathematicians and various historical personages (Martin Luther in particular) that simply do not belong here. This might be a pardonable sin, but Seife combines this problem with two others that are less forgivable-- frequent errors and outright arrogance. I could go on at length, but a review in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society captures the problems best. (...) As Gray points out in the review, Seife says contradictory things about the Mayan calendar, in one place claiming that it is more consistent than the Gregorian (by including a zero year in the calendar) but then showing how the mixing of 3 different calendars led to confusion about the days. At one point the book also notes how zero was an ancient concept beginning thousands of years before the first civilization, but later suggests it started just a few centuries before Christ in the Fertile Crescent. Seife's book is full of these maddening little errors, which together suggest that he was not thorough in his research and proofreading. Seife's discussion of the history of calculus is woeful, as Gray further notes. Seife conflates the history of Newtonian calculus with its representation in differential equation form, and exaggerates the importance of the indeterminate expression-- 0/0-- and its confrontation via L'Hopital's rule, in establishing the foundation of the calculus. The last third of the book, which moves into cosmology and physics, is simply awful; Seife has no idea what he's talking about, and his discussions are based either on totally outdated information or misconceptions of one kind or another. He states that "a black hole is a point." This is totally wrong! Even the singularity-- which had for a while been considered something like a point-- is probably not a point, as work in the past decade on quantum gravity has shown; and in any case, the black hole itself is a collapsed object and is not modeled as a point. Most disappointingly of all, Seife almost completely skips over the total alteration of the physical vacuum based on quantum physics-- this is precisely why "zero" and the "vacuum" are so interesting these days, *because* the vacuum is known to be such a vibrant place, but Seife's book totally misses this. As Gray goes on to point out, the fundamental flaw with Seife's sloppy book is that it wants less "to instruct" the reader than to get the reader "to marvel," so the book is high on flash and poor on substance. I'd strongly encourage anyone to read Gray's review, as it goes into much more depth that can be provided here. The only "dangerous idea" of Seife's book is the possibility that it might wind up recommended in school classrooms, leading students and teachers down the path of misinformation.
Rating:
Summary: Explaining the unexplainable....well!
Review: What can I say? Imagine being asked to write the a book on one of the most difficult mathematical subjects...and to do it for the layman. This is what Zero does and it does it well. George Seife takes us through the history of zero and makes it come alive.
After a while you start to think of Zero as an underdog hero that needs to be saved and restored to it's rightful place. Like a peasant king who needs to be restored to the throne. You care for Zero, you want Zero to succeed and more than that you UNDERSTAND Zero and the long strange journey it has gone through.
I bought this book for family and friends after reading it because it is a real lesson un understanding something that may not seem that complex. It is a history lesson, but more importantly it is a humanity lesson. I though this book was outstanding.
Rating:
Summary: The history of nothing.
Review: If you want to know a little history(more like a lot of history) of how numbers developed this is a really good book.This book includes: how our numbers came to be,how important mathematical formulas came to be, and how zero changed, and is still changing the world and our beliefs. This book tells alot of history of zero, for example: how people like Pythagoras and his followers killed people that, by their belief in zero, ruined the Pythagoreans perfect view of the world.
Well, I can't say much more, because that would ruin the point of the book.This is an extremely good book and I recommend this book to everybody.
Rating:
Summary: Depends on what you're looking for.
Review: I found this book to be unsatisfying because I was hoping for something more detailed and scholarly. However, if you are looking for a very general discussion, and you have no previous knowledge about the history of mathematics or the ideas of modern physics, you may enjoy this. Simply stated, if you would rather read a joke about Pythagoras than any details of his life or times, this book will give it to you. I would divide this book into two parts: the first is an extremely cursory treatment of the history of zero. If you are at all familiar with the history of mathematics (for example, the ideas of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Zeno's paradox, the Mayan calendar, the golden ratio, and the Fibonacci sequence) you will learn almost nothing new. There is no reasearch or detail here; only very general discussion similar to what you might get if you pulled up a web page or two on the subject. The second part is an equally general treatment of zero and infinity as it relates to modern science. If you know even the most basic ideas behind relativity and black holes, for example, you will receive no extra elucidation from this book. Frankly, I do not believe that this second part even belongs in the book. Rather than focusing on the history of zero, it is instead a mish-mash of ideas that remotely involve zero. Even if you have no prior knowledge of the subject whatsoever, you might still find this book unsatisfactory. I found the numerous puns and jokes to be distracting, not helpful, and not funny. Here is an example for you to judge: "Dividing by zero once -- just one time -- allows you to prove, mathematically, anything at all in the universe. You can prove that 1 + 1 = 42, and from there you can prove that J. Edgar Hoover was a space alien, that William Shakespeare came from Uzbekistan, or even that the sky is polka-dotted. (See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.)" Another problem is that even if you are looking for a book with simple explanations, the author does not do a good job here either. He certainly makes the attempt to keep things simple, but his analogies and explanations are often strange or confusing. If I weren't familiar with most of the ideas already, I'm not sure I would understand them now either. In some cases I had to go to outside sources to figure out what the author was talking about, even regarding subjects I had some knowledge of already.
Rating:
Summary: This book is no Zero!
Review: For someone who is not a math buff, but who appreciates a good story, this book was a real treat. It is an excellent and sometimes humorous read and I came away with a much better understanding and greater appreciation of how math is related to the social and theological development of the modern world, and too, how much further we have to go. While at times Seife got long winded in details, it brings home the importance of math to those of us who are not math folk. An excellent book that I recommend to every math teacher as a means to bring relevance to the subject, and to every student whos teacher hasn't read this book! I'll be giving it for Christmas presents this year.
Rating:
Summary: Mediocre treatment of a fascinating subject
Review: Charles Seife is a scientific journalist who's done quite a bit of good writing. This is sadly not an example of that. Like other authors on this topic, Seife focuses much of the book on the cultural, commercial, and mathematical history of zero, both symbol and concept. He then delves more deeply into the physical, philosophical, and cosmological ramifications. Throughout the book Seife demonstrates a supercilious tone that is irritating. He seems to think that he can win points by making fun of historical figures that he mentions, but his wisecracks come off as both juvenile and inappropriate. Most of what he writes about the history of the concept is not illuminating and can be found in any good desk encyclopedia, and Seife sacrifices too much substance for style when he writes, so that a reader emerges from a chapter having wondered what the point was. You might also wonder how careful Seife was in his fact-checking, since there are more than a few errors here that are not too difficult to discern. The one area where the book does relatively well is in examining the religious objections to the zero concept, which were in fact quite vehement. (One reviewer below cited the "For dust you are and to dust you shall return!" comment in Genesis to suggest that the zero concept, as applied cosmologically in Seife's book, harmonizes with the old religious notions. This is a cursory reading and is totally incorrect-- in fact the opposite is true. The statement in Genesis was directed specifically at Adam and Eve as a result of the disobedience that led to the Original Sin, and the goal-directed theology of the Judeo-Christian teachings was intended precisely to overcome the effects of the Original Sin in Adam and Eve's descendants, to lead them eternally to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a main reason that the religious authorities objected so strenuously to the zero concept and its associated ideas.) Seife does a so-so job with the always-interesting history of the zero's transmission from the Arab world to the medieval European one. It is in the later chapters that Seife's book totally falls apart. The most intriguing revisions of zero's meaning have come with quantum theory, but Seife devotes just couple pages to this and so skips the one thing that would actually make the book worth reading. The section looking at cosmology is absolutely worthless-rushed, incomplete, misleading, inaccurate. Seife is stuck using the same-old assumptions but overlooks the change in worldview brought about by the new understanding of the vacuum. As can be seen in quite a few good books on the subject these days (Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe is an excellent one), the new conceptualization of zero and vacuum means just the opposite from what Seife assumes here. The apparently physical zero, the vacuum, is in fact an eternal fountain. It is yet another example of the weakness in content exhibited throughout Seife's book. A better book for information on the modern zero concept is Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. It has its own problems but is far preferable to Seife's book.
Rating:
Summary: For the scientifically thwarted in life
Review: This is a great book for cutting your teeth on one of the most fundamental building blocks and destructive forces of science without having to remember what you learned in higher math classes. Highly recommend it as a precursor to Dennis Overbye's "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos" -- another must-read for other now grown kids who would have studied the sciences in college if only a few more high school math and science teachers had had a knuckleful of inspiration about how to connect assigned curriculum to the questions science seeks to answer and bring it to life. Funny in a lot of places, though a little rushed at the end, this book was very pleasurable reading.
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