In this text, Robert Kaplan explores the peculiar course that the notion of nothing or its mathematical representative, zero, has taken throughout history. Forced into our awareness 4000 years ago by the need to count ever larger multitudes, zero drifted in and out of focus, disappeared for centuries, then swept from the East into the medieval world, with fears and superstitions crouched around it. Did we discover or invent it? Was it the devil's work? Is it a number or a fiction? Its users came to see that it held immense power to unriddle the universe, leading to profound insights into the mind and the world. And now new layers are coming to light: our computers speak only in zeros and ones, and, for a cosmologist, zero alone can be made to generate everything.
Robert M. Kaplan Books
Dr. Robert M. Kaplan is a psychiatrist and clinical associate professor affiliated with the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His expertise lies in the field of psychiatry, contributing to academic research and teaching.
Traces the development of mathematical thinking and describes the characteristics of the "republic of numbers" in terms of humankind's fascination with, and growing knowledge of, infinity.
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