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A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers
Palgrave Macmillan
January 2015
On Sale: January 6, 2015
256 pages
ISBN: 1137279842
EAN: 9781137279842
Kindle: B00LRWXE4O
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest
abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually
everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or
quantified. The story of how and where we got these
numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years
been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure
filled saga of Amir Aczel’s lifelong obsession: to find the
original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly
crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts,
cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly
differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep
into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he
takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with the early Babylonian cuneiform
numbers, followed by the later Greek and Roman letter
numerals. Then Aczel asks the key question: where do the
numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals,
come from? It is this search that leads him to explore
uncharted territory, to go on a grand quest into India,
Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and ultimately into the wilds of
Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest
zero—the keystone of our entire system of numbers—on a
crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple
adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this
odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters:
academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for
adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless
smugglers, and treacherous archaeological thieves—who
finally reveal where our numbers come from.
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