Rating: 
Summary: Good back but drags in too many areas
Review: This book should have been a booklet. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 are truly magnificent. Seife starts out by covering the origin of zero in Babylonian mathematics and its transmission into India with Alexander the Great's armies, followed by its movement back westward into the numbering system of the Arabs and its introduction from there into western mathematics, where the Arabic numeral system came to replace the cumbersome Roman numerals. For the first 3 chapters I couldn't put the book down.Chapter 4 is out of place and adds nothing to the rest of the book. Chapter 5, however, is one of the most lucid chapters I've ever read on this subject. Up to this point calculus, might as well have been ancient Sanskrit to me, but Seife makes the concepts make sense-- you're actually able to trace the questions and developments that led to what we recognize as the calculus. You see how the problem of calculating the slope of a curve was solved by some clever methods that made ever finer approximations of the curve with straight lines. This chapter is splendid and alone makes the book worth reading. Unfortunately the book flounders in the remaining chapters, which are both superfluous and disorganized. The appendices still add a lot to it though, explaining ideas like the golden ratio and the derivative in its modern sense. I liked this book overall and would recommend it, just focus on the above chapters and the appendices and you'll get a lot out of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: This book was recommended to help with concepts in pre-calc class, and after slogging through it, I'm still straining to figure out what made it recommended in the first place. Bombastic writing, heavy-handed explanations, lame attempts at humor, and an infuriating self-importance that's obvious from Page One. The author makes himself out to be some kind of guru, all but claiming that he's found the secret of the world here, the marvelous number zero that "holds the key to mathematics and physics." Not only is this a ridiculous claim, but he spends more time repeating it than actually explaning why, in fact, it's as important as he claims it is. I find myself in fascination of the number also, especially it's history, the fact that it took many centuries for the number even to be accepted into western mathematics. To be fair, the author does do a better job relating the history than most other writers out there, and the first few chapters are informative. But he doesn't know when to cool down and be a bit more dispassionate about the subject, and the result is some unintentional humor as the book grinds on and becomes utterly full of itself. If you have this book, don't even bother reading past page 130-- it's just totally awful after that. Only the first 5 chapters make it worth examining at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun. Lighthearted. Enjoyable.
Review: This is a great book that tells about the history of Zero. It is a fast read, and I enjoyed every bit of it. It is facinating to learn that perspective-drawing had to be invented because no one could deal with a "zero" vanishing point.
Rating:
Summary: just great
Review: I read this book twice. The writing was clear and links between topics were natural. I thought the section where zero's historical place within the calculus was particularly well written. Zero really is a radical concept, and Seife take pains to show how it is connected to our concept of infinity. On both accounts, he accomplishes what he sets to do with great clarity.
Rating:
Summary: Zero worship
Review: This modestly-sized but oddly long-winded book becomes so engrossed in its subject matter that it loses all sense of proportion. The result is a mishmash of genuinely useful facts and explanations and stilted, exaggerated paragraphs on both the history and applications of the number zero. Seife titles his 4th and 5th chapters "The Infinite God of Nothing" and "Infinite Zeros and Infidel Mathematicians" and their contents befit their overenthusiastic, almost worshipful attitude toward the book's title number. The problem with this, as in similar pedestal-placing books, is that the reader is robbed of a detailed sense of where the number's introduction had an impact and finds applicability-- and where mathematics found its incorporation relatively peripheral, or just one of many other pieces of the puzzle, which if anything would have increased the respect for how the number's introduction changed mathematics. Seife does a good job in indicating the number's indispensibility for limit theorems and calculus. However, the author at times seems to so uncritically shine the spotlight on the number that the reader is deprived of perspective in seeing how the other elements came together to form the theory-- e.g the adoption of the Cartesian graph and early developments in analytic geometry, which were just as critical as the limit function in founding calculus. He even practically rails out in frustration at many of the Greek and medieval mathematicians for their obtuseness in rejecting zero, which is unnecessary and a little strange. There are many better books on this topic to read, which is disappointing because I very much wanted to like this book.
Rating:
Summary: A point of confusion has finally been resolved for me.
Review: This is one of the best books on mathematics for the general population I've ever read. It's an entertaining mix of history, biography, and philosophy, better than fiction in fact. Derivatives have always baffled me. How can you divide by something that you assume is zero? The appendix on derivatives is great. You take the limit of epsilon as it goes to zero only after dividing by epsilon, so there is no division by zero after all. This point was not made clear in any of my calculus text books and has always been a point of confusion for me. Siefe explicitly emphacized this. This in itself was worth getting the book.
Rating: 
Summary: The Facts of Nothings and Everythings
Review: The greatest battleship of all time, the USS Yorktown lay dead in the water, wounded by a simple number in its data. What number can do this much damage? Nothing. Zero. The old nemises of the Western culture and the destroyer of our math and our logic. Many thousands of years before our first civilization, our earliest ancestors were happy without zero, they only knew one thing or many things. Slowly, these primitive cultures developed more advanced math methods. The ancient Egyptians were the first to develop a complex math system from measuring farm areas. Later the Greek grew into power and adopted the Egyptian way of counting. However, the world had to face zero sooner or later and zero clashed with the ideas and philosiphies of the West. The Babylonians first used zero, the Indians worshipped zero, the Greeks hated zero, and later the Church came to reject zero, stunting the growth of science and mathmatics until the West finally accepted zero. From zero, many people saw heaven, the ultimate being, God. From mathmatics, algebra, geometry, calculus, to science, physics, atrophysics, quantum research, zero has changed and molded these sciences to its liking. Now, today we face zero as a neccessity in life; we finally respect zero with the honor it deserves.
I liked reading this book. Zero is witty, enlightening, and covers all the bases. From current facts to past historical event, the book fully talks about every aspect of the mysterious number. The theory of everthing in the universe, zero holds the key to everything we want to know. We can discover zero's counterpart, the infinte, by unlocking zero's secrets and researching the void and null. The book explains difficult concepts easliy and uses simple, concrete examples to show the reader each idea. Charles Seife creates a atmosphere of clarity and simplicity that even a 7th grader like me can understand. That is the best part about the book, it is easy to understand.
The portion about the Greek's fear of zero and their perfect irrational universe was interesting. It was fascinating to learn about Pythagoras and his brotherhood of Pythagoreans. Really, the Greeks are the ones that we Americans should give credit to for our math and everything else. The Greeks thought up of square numbers and triangular numbers, the concept of music, and our way of thinking about how numbers are shapes. However, we also inherited our fear of zero from the Greeks. The Golden Ratio, the Greeks were all over this ratio, the universal ratio was the perfect number. These are all primitive ideas, but Charles Seife has the charm to explain everything so well. Great book!
Rating: 
Summary: Okay, but covers no new ground
Review: Zero is an interesting number, especially if you try to divide by it. That is this book in a single sentence. Seife (who, amusingly has a name similar to "cipher," which has the same word origins as zero) starts this book off as a history of mathematics and the usefulness of zero in mathematical thought. He then goes off into physics and the zeroes associated with absolute zero, black holes and the big bang. While Seife has created a book that is quite readable and has a lot of good illustrations, there is very little that is original here. Anyone with a familiarity of math history would know everything in the first half of the book, and anyone who has read anything about modern cosmology would be familiar with the second half. Since this book does not get too deep in anything it covers, it might be a good introduction to these ideas, but for anyone who already has encountered these concepts before, this book offers little.
Rating:
Summary: A frustrating book to plow through
Review: This book is almost painful to struggle through. It has some of the most bombastic, exaggerated writing I've ever seen-- and in a book on math of all things. Seife tries to explain the history and application of the number zero, which until the second millennium was left out of most of the world's number systems. There are some interesting parts both in the history, and in the mathematical descriptions (as on the area calculation problems that led to integral calculus), but the reader has to wade through so much useless material and overhyped writing that it's just not worth it. In just the first few pages (where he focusses on a broad overview), Seife manages to squeeze in all manner of statements that remind one of a used-car salesmen trying to hype his product-- "No other number can do such damage," zero and "its everpresent threat to modern physics," "threatening to unravel the whole framework of scientific thought" (????), "Underneath every revolution lay a zero-- and an infinity," "Zero was at the heart of the battle between east and west. zero was at the center of the struggle between religion and science," "Within zero there is the power to shatter the framework of logic," and on and on and on, throughout the whole book. It's an interesting enough story as is, but this book ruins it by getting carried away in so many places. Just consult your class's calculus textbook instead-- you'll get much better content with far less hype.
Rating:
Summary: It turns out that nothing is really something.
Review: That's what you learn in a most interesting and sometimes entertaining way when you read "Zero". In fact, "Zero" is just plain fun if you are in any way intrigued with math. Seife gets your interest by explaining how a state-of-the-art navy cruiser was paralyzed by zero. What follows is the history, the parallels, the arguments, the denials, and finally, the gradual acceptance of a word, a value, and a concept that civilization as a whole took centuries to come to grips with. Seife tells the story with a variety of interesting tidbits of history and nature that make the book fun to read. I plan to read it again soon.
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