Nada, zip, zilch
by Nathan Matteson
I'm no social critic or philosopher. But I'd like to exercise my Constitutional rights in saying that there are quite a few things that we as a general public take for granted: the fact that the sun rises each day; that the dollar is worth more than the peso; that having $2 million is better than having $2. And what is it that separates those monetary two figures? Little but a digit that so closely resembles our letter "O."
Seemingly against all odds, Robert Kaplan explains the history of how this lowly digit came to mean so much, in his new volume "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero." From the Greeks to the Romans to the Macedonians to the Indians, zero's rise from an embarrassing and heretical concept to a full blown tenth digit is laid out in clear, concise and understandable (even to the nonmathematical layman) detail. We're taken—rather compellingly—through the various historical counting methods: the Greek merchants' hand counting, the pre-backgammon counting board, the Mayan calendar and the abacus. All of which, of course, led to the modern day calculator, and all of which had no real method of representing zero. (At one point zero didn't even constitute a real digit, but was rather a sort of mathematical punctuation.)
It's hard to say exactly which ancient culture lays ultimate claim to the birth of "0" as a written figure unto itself, because so many societies utilized a circular written symbol which was used in some approximate capacity or another. But authorship isn't the real issue of the book. And the fact that this figure doesn't merely pertain to the realm of mathematics that most of us jettisoned after our sophomore year in college. For as soon as Kaplan explains the history of the number's emergence and use, he begins to explicate its philosophical and physical impossibility. All those who suffered through calculus are surely familiar with the concept of the value of a function as a number approaches zero—but never quite reaches it. But who among us has related this to Leibniz's like notion the infinitesimal—the smallest unit which is indivisible? And to Gershwin lyrics?
Kaplan constructs a journey that begins to convince us that zero is much more insidious than a mere tool for converting a two-dollar bill into a Jackson; instead it's a concept that forms and informs every aspect of our existence.
"The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero"
by Robert Kaplan
Oxford University Press, $22, 256 pages
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.