Finding Zero

October 13, 2014
Prolific mathematics writer Aczel (Why Science Does Not Disprove God) leads a historical adventure that doubles as a surprisingly engaging math lesson. Fascinated with numbers and their origins from an early age, it’s no surprise Aczel became a mathematician. A chance encounter with an Aztec artifact reawakened his childhood desire to trace the origins of the numbers we use—especially the placeholder, zero. Most histories taught that our familiar digits “were believed to have originated in India,” but there was no proof of that. Hot on the trail of a possibly mythical ancient artifact, Aczel moves from India to Angkor Wat in modern-day Cambodia, along the Mekong River, and north into Vietnam. The story brims with local color, as well as insights into the history of mathematics and philosophy. Readers may find themselves questioning Aczel’s sanity, as his obsession with zero’s origins drives him from one dead end to the next, but it’s difficult to avoid being drawn into his quest with these rip-roaring exploits and escapades. Photos. Agent: Albert Zuckerman, Writers House.

November 1, 2014
The author of the best-selling Fermat's Enigma (1996) and other popular books on mathematics and science takes readers through a history of zero and takes himself on a journey through the jungles of Cambodia to find its the earliest use.Aczel (Why Science Does Not Disprove God, 2014, etc.) seems to have had a lifelong love for numbers and a special fascination with zero. As a child, he wanted to devote his life to traveling the world in search of an answer to the origin of numbers. In this book, he lives out part of that childhood dream. A brief discussion of the cumbersome Roman system, which lacked a zero, demonstrates the power of the zero, which makes our number system so efficient. Aczel rejects the theory that it was a European or Arabic invention but rather that it developed in eastern Asia. To him, the concepts of both infinity and of nothingness seem embedded in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. To get to zero, he takes readers through a short but sometimes bewildering course in Eastern philosophy that requires close attention. On learning that in the 1930s, a French archaeologist had discovered in Cambodia a stele inscribed with a date that utilized a dot for a zero in the seventh century, Aczel set out to find the stone tablet. Because the Khmer Rouge had destroyed so many of Cambodia's cultural artifacts, his search was long, complicated and arduous and involves a slew of characters, helpful and otherwise. Aczel is nothing if not persistent, and in the end, he found the carving and photographed it. What happened afterward as he struggled to preserve this earliest known evidence of the use of zero is a story in itself. If readers can avoid getting bogged down inn the side trips through Eastern philosophy, the journey to zero is an adventure worth joining.

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December 1, 2014

Our system of decimal arithmetic notation, using the so-called Arabic numerals: 0,1,2...9, seems so natural and automatic that one feels it has always been that way for all people at all times. Of course, that is not the case. The numerals were invented in the distant past and have mutated into their current form only in the past few hundred years. In this combination of memoir, travelog, and philosophical musing, Aczel (mathematics, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston; Fermat's Last Theorem) recounts his search for the origin of the numerals. In particular, he focuses on zero, the linchpin that makes the place-value system possible. His travels take him to India and onward to other parts of southeast Asia in an attempt to rediscover the once found, but then lost again, first-recorded use of a symbol for zero in arithmetic. By a combination of perseverance, timely assistance, and good fortune, Aczel finds his goal in Cambodia--evidence literally chiseled in stone--on a partially damaged but still legible stele that barely survived the depredations of the Khmer Rouge. VERDICT Recommended for anyone who cares about the history of mathematics and science.--Harold D. Shane, Mathematics Emeritus, Baruch Coll. Lib., CUNY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
In ancient Buddhist meditations on the first door of liberation as emptiness, Aczel glimpses the origin of a powerful mathematical concept: zero. But to actually reach that origin, the author must complete an arduous double journey, one intellectual, another geographic. Readers share the exhilarationand frustrationof both journeys. They accompany Aczel as he tests the limits of coldly cerebral Western mathematical logic against the stunning eroticism of numerical thinking in Hinduism, and weighs the true-false reasoning of Aristotle against the bewildering four-prong logic of the Buddha. But the quest for the birthplace of the zeroand its curiously linked antithesis, infinityrequires not just philosophical reflection. It also requires the physical exertion of travel: readers go to Mexico City to scan the Aztec Stone of the Sun for clues as to Mesoamerican numeracy, to Khajuraho to contemplate an ancient numerical matrix surrounded by statues of nude figures engaged in sex, and to Jaipur to inspect numerals inscribed on centuries-old astronomical instruments. But it is finally in a deserted shed in Cambodia that author and readers share the thrill of (re)discovering a long-lost stone clearly engraved with the world's first known zero! An exciting personal adventure reminding readers of how much nothing really means!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)