I’m reading Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea at the moment. It’s spinning my head a little bit, and I have to admit that I am skipping the serious maths bits. But it is enjoyable, and it is truly bizarre to think about the consequences of zero and infinity in maths, physics, and… everything else…. I should finish it tonight; I’ll write more about it once my brain recovers.
- Comment
- Reblog
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Randomly Yours, Alex 
I find it very hard to imagine what the human mind was like when there was no conception of zero. Isn’t it natural that there is this number line from 1 to infinity going to the right, the same numbers negatively going to the left and 0 in the middle? Then there are the imaginary numbers orthogonal to that, with positive i going up and negative i going down, defining a plane of complex numbers.
Well yes, at least some of that has to be taught, unless someone is incredibly smart. But nature thinks it’s natural. That’s what works to explain the nature of physics. It doesn’t sound like that when these ideas are introduced in math classes. They just sound made up. But they’re not. Does this book explain that?
Yes! It spends a lot of time in the first section discussing particularly the Greeks and how they dealt with maths without zero, and their aversion to both zero and infinity. Some of the issues I’d read about before in a book about the calendar, which looked at how you figure out the exact length of the year etc and necessarily had to talk about zero because you can only get exact when you’ve got fractions, not Roman numerals…. Anyway, yes, complex numbers etc are in there – that’s part of what’s mucking with my brain (that, and Appendix A, where it’s proved that Winston Churchill is a carrot…).
Hmm, not to indulge my prejudices too much, but I would bet I can find the error in “proving” Churchill was a carrot. I still remember the “proof” that 1=2 from high school. In twenty or so lines of perfectly true statements, there was one line that was the equivalent of dividing both sides of an equation by zero. You can go anywhere if you accept that as true.
It’s been a metaphor for me ever since for how people can go off the track in their thinking. Make one mistake, and you can sound logical arguing for anything.
That’s the one! I love it – that mathematicians are willing to do something like that – and with a straight face, I would imagine, to see how many people they can con. It’s like word play only with numbers. Beautiful!