A concise and appealing look at the strangest number in the universe and its continuing role as one of the great paradoxes of human thought

The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now, as Y2K fever rages, it threatens a technological apocalypse. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything.

In Zero science journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. Here are the legendary thinkers--from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists--who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persists in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for a theory of everything.

Readers of Fermat's Enigma, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Seeing and Believing, and Longitudewill find the revealingly illustrated Zero freshly informative, easy to understand, and--infinitely--fascinating. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

作者簡介

查爾斯•塞弗(Charles Seife)，畢業於耶魯大學，科學記者，《科學美國人》《經濟學人》《連綫》雜誌撰稿人。查爾斯•塞弗有四本專著，包括《數字是靠不住的》《瓶中的太陽》《零》等，曾榮獲國際筆會/瑪莎•阿爾布蘭奬非小說類奬項，他的書被《紐約時報》列入推薦書目名單。現定居美國紐約，為紐約大學新聞學專業教授。

譯者簡介

楊立汝，女，畢業於華南理工大學外國語學院，譯有長篇小說《逃離柏林》《焚燒的紙天空》，散文集《散步》等。