The Nothing That Is by Robert Kaplan

The Nothing That Is

A Natural History of Zero

by Robert Kaplan

Illustrations by Ellen Kaplan

Allen Lane, The Penguin Press 1999, [First Edition], ISBN 0713992840, lightly illustrated with line drawings in text, hardcover, dustjacket

Near Fine Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing, bumping, chipping and creasing  (See photographs)

“Forced into our awareness two and a half thousand years ago by the need to count ever-larger multitudes, zero began its career as two wedges pressed into a wet lump of Sumerian clay.  Here was the imaginative piece of mental engineering that would give us the art of counting.  Nevertheless, the subsequent history of the notion ‘nothing’ and its mathematical representative was far from straightforward.  Even the Greeks, mathematically brilliant as they were, didn’t have a zero, Or did they?”