Zero to Infinity A Review of Charles Seife’s ZERO: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Abstract

“Nil”, “Nunca”, “Nada”, “Nil”, “Nothing”, “Zero”. Sounds of a multilingual class of mathematics, perhaps. No, it is the sounds around the family table card game as we all declare the number of tricks that we would like to take in a card game called Wizard. The speaker is telling the scorekeeper that they would not like to take any tricks. They would like to take “zero” tricks as if they could gather the zero cards. We all know that we do not want any tricks and we do our best not to take any if we declare that we want zero tricks.