Zero
The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Chapter One
Nothing Doing
[ THE ORIGIN OF ZERO ]
There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there
was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.
What stirred? Where?
—The Rig Veda
The story of zero is an ancient one. Its roots stretch back
to the dawn of mathematics, in the time thousands of
years before the first civilization, long before humans could
read and write. But as natural as zero seems to us today, for
ancient peoples zero was a foreign—and frightening—idea.
An Eastern concept, born in the Fertile Crescent a few centuries
before the birth of Christ, zero not only evoked images
of a primal void, it also had dangerous mathematical properties.
Within zero there is the power to shatter the framework
of logic.
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