scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1515279

Publication date 10 October 2000

Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to history and biography (01-01) General histories, source books (01A05)

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This is a belletristic story interwoven with serious excursions into the history of mathematics, where the leader role plays `zero'. Zero began its story some 5.000 years ago with Sumerians: two wedges pressed into a wet lump of clay as the separation symbol in the middle of their sexagesimal number. Greeks had no positional notation and therefore no symbol for zero. Only after Alexander's invasions they discovered the crucial role that zero played in counting. In their astronomical papyri of the third century BC can be found the symbol `O' for zero. The author discusses in the book why just this symbol `O'. Archimedes in his `Psammites' (Sand Reckoner) worked with number names rather than digits and had not our convenient notation for powers of ten. Here Gauss is cited: `How could he have missed it? To what height science would have risen by now!' Telling about the invasion route of Alexander in 326 BC in India, and the later routes of commerce from Alexandria, the author concludes: `The Greek influence on Indian culture of this time is clear.' `It would not surprise you, then, were the reincarnation of zero in India to be in the guise of the hollow circle we know from Greek astronomical papyri.' Following \textit{Karl Lang-Kirnberg} [Die Herkunft der Null, Micro-Bibl. Anthropos, 41 (1968/69)] the author reminds that the Sumerians, before they wrote with a stylus, made their marks in clay with a reed and their symbol for 10 was the reed's unslanted impress: O, afterwards multiplying a number by 10. In Moorish Spain -- as early as 950 AD -- there are figures the Arabs called `dust numerals', where \(\ddot 8 3\) would mean 803, but \(\ddot 8 \dot 3\) 830. (Meanwhile the Mayan symbols for zero are treated; it is mentioned that for them Zero was the Death god.) The tracks of zero (as an envoy of emptiness) in Western languages are followed, as well as in the first books on arithmetic with Arabic numerals. During the further development of calculus some problems arose with \(a^0\) and especially with \(0^0\) (connected with \(3^0=2^0=1^0= ({1\over 2})^0=({1\over 3})^0=\cdots =1\), but \(0^3=0^2=0^1= 0^{1\over 2}=0^{1\over 3}=\cdots=0?)\). Newton's point of view: `stop asking what it is and ask instead how it acts' led to axiom systems and to 0 as the additive identity. However, zero may be addition's acolyte, but multiplication preserves its renegade status: every number except 0 has a multiplicative inverse! In a new light zero fell in the calculus of infinitesimals (`almost nothings'). Here the approaches of Fermat, Newton, and Leibniz are acquainted, also the story of l'Hôpital's Rule is told, and how the problem of whether \(0^0\) is 0 or 1 was solved by the function \(z^z\) with complex \(z\) by means of the \(x^x\) spindle. New applications gave the problem of extremal points. Also cosmological problems are treated ranging from search of the centre of the Universe to the Big Bang. Finally, several speculations about `nothing', `eternity', and `non-being' are connected with some citations from the works of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Virginia Woolf. A large Bibliography is given on 12 pages, but without detailed citations in the text. An index is added.

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