"Zero follows the number zero from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe and its apotheosis as the mystery of a black hole. Here are the legendary thinkers who battled over the meaning of this mysterious number - scholars and mystics, cosmologists and clergymen whose clashes over zero shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. ". "Charles Seife's account takes us from Aristotle to superstring theory by way of Pythagoras, Descartes, the Kabbalists, and Einstein. It is a concise tour of a universe of ideas bound up in the simple notion of nothing. "--BOOK JACKET.