Reddit reviews Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
We found 47 Reddit comments about Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Penguin Books
Wow. Something I can talk to... I'm an engineer.
I'm going to guess that they mean "decimal place" or "place value". Arabic numerals have set places, based on their relation to zero, that define their meaning. The further from zero you are, the larger, or smaller, the value of the number is! Each spot further down the line is an order of magnitude smaller or larger!
Non-arabic numeral based systems don't have that constraint. Roman numerals, for instance, simply "add up" the value of each number but can have each number listed in the "numerical phrase" in various orders... and still represent the same number.
The advantage to having a system with place value comes in to play when you're doing complex, and abstract, math. Multiplication is an example of this. I don't even know how you would go about multiplying two numbers using Roman numerals... but, it's rather straight forward in Arabic Numeral/ Western Math... and even binary if base ten isn't your thing.
Also, while the Romans, and Greeks, had exposure to the concept of "nothing" they didn't really use "zero" in math (which is too bad, if they had, we might have gotten calculus a few centuries earlier) due to religious beliefs about the philosophical meaning between the concept of "The Infinite" and its opposite, "Nothing" (zero and infinity are both necessary for concepts for calculus... and the Greeks felt that Infinity was a Divine concept. And since Nothing is the Opposite of Infinity, it must be sinister and evil and not used).
Now, I don't know anything of Mayan math. But, if they had a positional, or place-holder, system, then they might have been able to do some very, very interesting math. Unfortunately, it looks like OP is saying that we can only show what the Mayans might have been capable off of the little we know of their counting method, and not actually what they could do...
Here's a link I found after a quick Google search
Here's one that summarizes the bit about Calculus (yes, it's pop-math history, but it's interesting and pretty decently written)
Charles Seife wrote a book about this from a mathematical perspective (which is great, IMO).
He talks about a few cultures, and says that the Greeks, and thus much of the western world, were a bit twitchy about the concept of zero as a standalone number because it represented a void, which conflicted with the prevailing systems of philosophy. A lot of their math was based on geometry, like the Egyptians before them, and zero didn't exist in geometry. How can you think about a non-space?
There are interesting side effects of this - notably our calendar, which goes from 1 BC (-1) to 1 CE, with no zero, meaning it's very easy to mess up the arithmetic of time around then.
Have you read Zero: The Biography of A Dangerous Idea by Charles Seif? It's fantastic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140296476/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_uFfVAb277KQG5
Others have already answered this question, but I thought I might direct you toward a book on the the subject that I enjoyed reading: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
My 2¢ :
While a "discovery" may involve a lot of hard work (i.e. the discovery of DNA's double-helix), at some level it still seems to imply:
An "invention", on the other hand, implies a thing which was built to achieve a specific purpose, which is the case with Calculus.
Also, recall that Leibniz developed ("invented") calculus independently of Newton. They were both working toward a common goal to describe phenomena that they knew to exist. Calculus is the shorthand which was invented to solve this.
For an interesting take on this, I'd recommend reading: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife.
Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Ideahas a pretty good start, and bibliography, on the church and zero. In short, it allowed them to monopolize accounting and taxation.
Salt: A World History
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Zero had a long road before it was accepted as a rational concept. See the book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. It's not preposterous to assume someone was having troubles with 0 conceptually.
Si eu am kindle si vad ca primele 30 carti din el sunt numai de design si ceva self-help (Confessions of an introvert is quite good), plus ebook-urile /r/nosleep.
Citesc mai mult nonfictiune, beletristica rar, si mi-au placut teribil Fast Food Nation, Zero: The biography of a dangerous idea si The man who mistook his wife for a hat.
Si va urasc cu profilele si recomandarile voastre ca am ales deja 6 carti de la voi pe care vreau sa le citesc si n-am timp.
For those who are interested in such things may I recommend the following:
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
This is the first time I've ever been able to make this recommendation in an appropriate place.
Here is a really good ass book about the subject:
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Division by zero is just one particular topic. You may as well ask for a book about cross-multiplication.
There is a book about zero. I really enjoyed this book, but I haven't read it in a long time, so I don't remember much about it. But I'm pretty sure it discusses division by 0.
Advanced in the sense that they had the number zero and Europe didn't.
It's such a huge deal, there are entire books on why it was such an advanced concept for the time.
The concept of zero is relatively new. If you really want your mind blown, read Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
Its illogical to be able to take anything (even zero) away from zero. zero is a weird little digit we use as both a placeholder and to represent 'nothing'. Zero is not a thing which can be broken into pieces.
There is a GREAT book I read a while back that goes into a whole lot of depth on the idea of zero. I found it very interesting, you might too.
found a link to it on amazon, maybe you could find it at a library... (or online if you're better at the internet than me)
Zero The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
If this interests you, I cannot recommend highly enough Charles Seife's "Biography of a dangerous idea":
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140296476/sr=8-1/qid=1142158680/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5782921-8657710?%5Fencoding=UTF8
One of the most enjoyable books on science that I have read.
Interesting. There is a good book on the history of the number zero but I honestly don't know if you'd like it or not. https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seife/dp/0140296476/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1526496930&sr=8-2&keywords=zero+book if you happen to be interested.
People have definitely run mazes end decks before but they certainly aren't common. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
[ Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea] (http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476)
Read This It explains everything you would ever need to know about zero, and how it scared Christians and disproves some of their Bible theories too.
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
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and
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The Golden Ratio
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are two of my favorites
You should check out Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. It's an very interesting read.
One of the best courses I've had in college was the history of math. It was a one quarter class so it obviously couldn't cover everything but instead focused on the universal problem of measuring areas and volumes, starting roughly some discovered papyrus scrolls from Egyptians trying to measure plots of land to Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus.
As others have said, it didn't really teach you math. I had already taken several higher level math classes and calculus was a requirement, but it was really interesting to see how trying to answer that question was refined over time.
I think one problem with learning math along side the history of math is we have much better techniques for solving problems now. One of the touch things about the course was trying to figure out the various proofs because they went through very complicated steps which we now take for granted.
Not related to the course, but I really recommend the book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea which talks about how the number 0 came to be, what problems it caused when people were coming up with the concept, and what ideas it continues to cause today.
this fantastic book mentions the very same event http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476
Zeno's paradox isn't really a paradox. it's actually REALLY simple to explain:
You take limit as the distance between two points reaches 0. This is the fundamental operation in calculus.
Why is it not a paradox now but it was back then? Because they didn't believe in the number 0. There is a really good book called Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (http://www.amazon.ca/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476)
A great read! I recommend it!
Assuming by "numbers" you mean the set of numbers {0,1,2,.....} (commonly known as the "Natural" numbers) you should first know that there is some debate as to whether or not to include 0.
Whether you decide to include 0 or not, no one knows where/when the concept of the Natural numbers originated. In some cultures, notably the Piraha, they appear to have never been developed so if you believe Kronecker's "God gave us the integers...", God appears to have forgotten to tell to the Piraha.
My own view on the origin of the natural numbers is that they probably arose from trade. A scenario, which may or may not be true but I find particularly appealing, is given in Eugenia Cheng's book "How to Bake Pi". As an example suppose that I want to trade 1 salt cake for each sheep you have. I could line up all the sheep and parade them by one by one. As each sheep passed I could hand over 1 salt cake. This involves lining up the sheep, which, having lived with sheep as a kid, I can tell you is not the easiest thing to do. So instead you could just point at each sheep and hand over a salt cake, perhaps, as Cheng proposes in a likely nod to her musical background, singing a song while doing so. Then the song itself becomes the counting mechanism. The reason I like this so much is that it fits well with Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Mo
If you want to learn more about the historical origins of zero you might try: Zero:The Biography of a Dangerous Number be forewarned that this is a pop-sci book and it's tone is a fairly hyperbolic, here's a review that I think sums up this up pretty well.
Read this book.
The author recants the history of the notion of nothing and how that notion shaped our current world. Or something. I was ordered to expand on my post so here I am doing that.
Foolproof is a good example of this. Lots of self-contained chapters on random fun problems. (My only large critique is that the first chapter is very out of place; being basically a history schpiel. Mischaracterizes the book.)
Then there’s math adjacent stuff like Zero: the history of a dangerous idea that look at the history of math development.
(Side note: the first chapter of Pinter’s A Book of Abstract Algebra is a top knotch example of that. And very much in place, unlike the foolproof chapter I mentioned.
Then there are things that aren’t quite “pop”, but make themselves more accessible. Like An Illustrated Guide to Number Theory, which is both a legitimate intro to number theory and a reasonably sexy coffee table book that guests can leaf through. (Though I’d like to see a book that pushes the coffee table style accessibility further.)
There's a nice book about it!
Kepler's Conjecture: How Some of the Greatest Minds in History Helped Solve One of the Oldest Math Problems in the World and Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea are riveting histories.
First math book I read for pleasure was Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. Its focus is more on the history side of things, which come to think of it makes it weird that I liked it since I normally am not interested in history.
But it's pretty amazing to imagine living in a society where zero was not was an accepted concept--in fact, it hadn't just not been thought of, it was actively denounced by the Church.
It's been maybe a decade since I read it, but I still remember the BS proof they used back then.
God cannot do evil.
There is nothing God cannot do.
Therefore,"nothing" is evil.
And with that, you were disallowed from using the concept of 0. Which makes a lot of math really difficult.
I read Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea a few years ago and found it pretty fascinating. It's a really interesting mix of history, philosophy, math, and physics.
One of my favorites on the history of zero by Charles Seife. Short, interesting, and well-explained. Has some challenging math concepts later in the book.
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346799685&sr=8-1&keywords=zero+the+biography+of+a+dangerous+idea
There wasn't a year zero because zero didn't exist in the first number systems. This is because numbers were for counting so you didn't need zero. Also people didn't like zero because it suggested infinity (the opposite of nothing is everything basically) and that was a scary concept. If you're really interested, I recommend Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea which I finished recently. It's really well-written.
I really like just about anything. I read Zero: A Biography of a Dangerous Idea and absolutely loved it. I took a stab at this Set Theory book but it was way over my head. I don't like it if the book is too technical, but I have a somewhat extensive knowledge of computers, mathematics (number theory mostly), computer science, physics, etc
I can post a few links from some books about numbers. I haven't read a few of them, but the history of some numbers like phi, pi, zero... all of them are fascinating.
Those six are all the history of the five most important constants in mathematics. If you're looking for the history of some of the most brilliant minds in mathematics, I'm afraid I haven't the resources or expertise to help you out.
as a math major, nothingness is zero. I recommend this book on the history of people trying to understand "nothingness"
My guess is Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. Very interesting read. Not focused on programming, though.
Zero is a whole number, and pretty awesome at that. If you want, this book tells the story of zero. And explains why the phones and calculators are different.
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seife/dp/0140296476
> Equations do not solve themselves.
Yes they do. The solution exists whether someone finds it or not.
> If some crazy religious group were to decide that mathematics is evil, and put a mathematician on trial for practicing mathematics, then you obviously would want to argue that mathematics is an extremely useful body of knowledge without which modern civilization as we know it could not exist. You do sometimes have to defend people by defending their ideas.
> You might say that this is a ridiculous hypothesis since no one has ever claimed that mathematics is evil
actually no, it isn't ridiculous for that reason, it just isn't logically consistent. Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise.
(also several times in history, several mathematical concepts have been deemed "evil." One example is the concept of the number zero. see Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea which turns out to be an excellent example of why free thought (and free speech) is crucial to free society and progress.
> If mathematics was not discussed or written about by anybody, then it would be forgotten and would effectively cease to exist.
This is just silly. Mathematics exists apart from the symbols that describe it. 2 + 2 = 4 whether you those symbols or not. It doesn't require a person to discuss it or know it or agree with it. Just like other ideas.
> Conceivably it would be up to future scholars, if any still existed in our hypothetical world devoid of mathematics, to re-invent it or to re-discover forgotten texts.
The language to communicate ideas is invented, but ideas exist whether or not language has been invented to describe them.
I could say II + II = IV or 2+2=4 or communicate that idea in any number of ways, but even if there was no mind to think it, the concept would still exist, just waiting there for a mind to come along and discover it.
the actual boring stuff.. i dont do popsci crap click bait weak ass shit "10 ways the earth will end!".
This isn't theoretical physics but its ... mathish.. does stuff like this count as popsci crap?
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seife/dp/0140296476
not sure if I know what popsci articles are.. I assume its like some cute lil blog article about half a concept.. Shit I am not a scholar by any means. I just prefer to pass the night away in my bed reading this stuff while the calming sounds of snores wash over me. (wife snores every so slightly) and I am night owl.
https://usa.newonnetflix.info/info/80067800/s this was on netflix for a bit.. that was an amazingly good series put together. Most would find it boring as hell. I watched that at least 4 times through before they took it off. (provided thats not reading...) I just don't know if i fall into popsci or not.
Absolutely. I got a real love of science reading various books through school. A few recommendations:
Achilles in the quantum universe
Absolute zero
Zero: Biography of a dangerous idea
I suppose Achilles and Zero are more about math than science or engineering, but I really liked them.
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Also, Western mathematics hadn't really incorporated the concept of zero when the calendar was formalized.
Here's one of the more interesting books I've read in awhile:
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
You should read the Biography of Zero. Great read.
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476
Everyone else has said great things to you. Here's my input.
http://www.amazon.ca/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476
For some light reading (a term used loosely here, but hey, I found it entertaining in my off-hours), check out this book. Enjoy!