Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Charles Seife's Zero is a popular history of one number and the arguments it has set off in mathematics, philosophy, religion and physics.

Seife follows zero from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe and its rise in the West. Along the way he covers the thinkers who tried to understand it, from Pythagoras and Newton to Heisenberg, and the clashes that pitted East against West and faith against reason. The book closes on zero in black holes, the Big Bang and the search for a theory of everything. This Penguin paperback is 256 pages.

Seife is a science journalist and a professor of journalism at New York University. Zero won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction and was a New York Times Notable Book. His later books include Proofiness. He has written for the New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, Science, Scientific American and The Economist.