Bill's Reading List

[billdo1]

11) Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife (2000). I found this to be really two books in one, the first is about the difficult introduction of the concept of zero into western mathematics and the second is about how zero, and its alter ego, the infinite, were central to the development of advanced mathematical concepts from

Comments

[snarkbot]

Loved this book.

I like the story about Archimedes trying to make parabolic mirrors so he could focus sunlight onto invading warships to set them on fire.

Parabolas are easy to define using calculus, but because zero was a no-no back then, Archie had to use an awkward series of smaller and smaller triangles. So close. We could have had calculus a couple millenia early.