After all, children count “one, two, three,” not “zero, one, two.”

Kabbalists thought that words and phrases with the same numerical value were mystically linked. For instance, Genesis 49:10 states, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah . . . until Shiloh come.” The Hebrew phrase for “until Shiloh come” has a value of 358, exactly the same for the Hebrew word meshiach, messiah. Hence, the passage presages the

One of the first mathematical proofs in history was about the incommensurability/irrationality of the square’s diagonal.

Chapter 3 Nothing Ventured [ZERO GOES EAST] Where there is the Infinite there is joy. There is no joy in the finite. —THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD

The Siriona Indians of Bolivia and the Brazilian Yanoama people don’t have words for anything larger than three; instead, these two tribes use the words for “many” or “much.”

No other number can do such damage. Computer failures like the one that struck the Yorktown are just a faint shadow of the power of zero. Cultures girded themselves against zero, and philosophies crumbled under its influence, for zero is different from the other numbers. It provides a glimpse of the ineffable and the infinite.

Zero makes this cumbersome system obsolete. In the Babylonian system—with zero in it—it’s easy to write fractions. Just as we can write 0.5 for 1/2 and 0.75 for 3/4, the Babylonians used the numbers 0;30 for 1/2 and 0;45 for 3/4. (In fact, the Babylonian base-60 system is even better suited to writing down fractions than our modern-day base-10

was an Italian architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, who first demonstrated the power of an infinite zero: he created a realistic painting by using a vanishing point.

Achilles speeds ahead, and in a mere second he has caught up to where the tortoise was. But by the time he reaches that point, the tortoise, which is also running, has moved ahead by half a foot. No matter. Achilles is faster, so in half a second, he makes up the half foot. But again, the tortoise has moved ahead, this time by a quarter foot. In a