Zero

From this, linguists conclude that ten was the basic unit in the Germanic protolanguages that English came from, and thus those people used a base-10 number system.

It is no coincidence that zero and infinity are linked in the vanishing point. Just as multiplying by zero causes the number line to collapse into a point, the vanishing point has caused most of the universe to sit in a tiny dot. This is a singularity, a concept that became very important later in the history of science—but at this early stage, mat

The monks can’t be faulted for their ignorance. Indeed, during the Middle Ages the only Westerners who studied math were the Christian monks. They were the only learned ones left. Monks needed math for two things: prayer and money. To count money, they needed to know how to . . . well . . . count. To do this, they used an abacus or a counting board

After all, half of infinity is still infinity. Thus, the value of being a Christian is infinite. Now what happens if you are an atheist? If you are correct—there is no God—you gain nothing from being right.

The number of rabbits goes as follows: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, . . .; the number of rabbits you have in any given month is the sum of the rabbits that you had in each of the two previous months. Mathematicians instantly realized the importance of this series. Take any term and divide it by its previous term. For instance, 8/5=1.6; 13/8=1.

Triangles and circles were easy to measure, but slightly more irregular curves like the parabola were beyond the ken of the Greek mathematicians of the day.

An Eastern concept, born in the Fertile Crescent a few centuries before the birth of Christ, zero not only evoked images of a primal void, it also had dangerous mathematical properties. Within zero there is the power to shatter the framework of logic.

How would a Babylonian write the number 60? The number 1 was easy to write: . Unfortunately, 60 was also written as ; the only difference was that was in the second position rather than the first.

Geometric constructions and shapes were the same thing. Zero was a number that didn’t seem to make any geometric sense, so to include it, the Greeks would have had to revamp their entire way of doing mathematics. They chose not to.