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.

作者简介

查尔斯•塞弗(Charles Seife)，毕业于耶鲁大学，科学记者，《科学美国人》《经济学人》《连线》杂志撰稿人。查尔斯•塞弗有四本专著，包括《数字是靠不住的》《瓶中的太阳》《零》等，曾荣获国际笔会/玛莎•阿尔布兰奖非小说类奖项，他的书被《纽约时报》列入推荐书目名单。现定居美国纽约，为纽约大学新闻学专业教授。

译者简介

杨立汝，女，毕业于华南理工大学外国语学院，译有长篇小说《逃离柏林》《焚烧的纸天空》，散文集《散步》等。