Zero, The biography Of A Dangerous Idea: by Charles Seife.

One presumes that the official description about this book, given on the site Shelfari,

"A concise and appealing look at the strangest number in the universe and its continuing role as one of the great paradoxes of human thought The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now, as Y2K fever rages, it threatens a technological apocalypse. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything. In Zero science journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. Here are the legendary thinkers--from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists--who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persists in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for a theory of everything. Readers of Fermat's Enigma , The Man Who Loved Only Numbers , Seeing and Believing , and Longitude will find the revealingly illustrated Zero freshly informative, easy to understand, and--infinitely--fascinating."

is related to contents of the book and not merely the blunder of someone else in description of the book.

Such assumptions are not far-fetched, since another book by an Italian writer spends an inordinate amount of paper and words to insinuate that only Europe - not even ancient Greece at that, no one before relatively modern science of Europe - could ever have really understood the golden ratio or the golden rectangle, much less built based on it.

Such thinking is obviously worth a good flush and yet it survives much as the assumptions about superiority of pale sun-starved colourings of hair do. Just to deal with one here, generally it is known that mathematics was revolutionised due to two important discoveries that reached Europe from India via Arabs, one of them was algebra (Hisab Al Jabr, literally mathematics of equations) and the other the concept of zero and numerical system based on using zero.

This description above however would have an average reader believe that "Babylon invented it, Hindus worship it" which fits neatly with the agenda to milk money from average middle class church goer to convert the poor heathen that seems to worship everything into the normal butchering and one day a week in a designated structure only authorised worshipping sort of person, before the said convert is integrated into the world as a lower race rather than one that seems to think they have a lot to be proud of.

That zero is both a trememdous idea and a useful symbol, a deep philosophical concept and perception of reality on an ultimate level and at the same time a means of making mathematics and numbers stupendously easier than the cumbersome Roman variation, is perhaps beyond whoever wrote that description above, whether the writer of the book or otherwise.

The war is not about whether it was "invented" by Babylon or India, since no one is paying any royalty in either case - although it is worth questioning why Europe did not have it when Roman numerals were used if Babylon did have it all the while, and if it was not the faraway India that was a reclusive world in itself that was the real origin of the concept.

No, the real question, the one worth asking, is about the subliminal message in the blurb, the underlying assumptions, the hierarchy of races and cultures assumed in face of evidence to the contrary.

For instance I am certain that the author is unaware of the complex astronomical calculations that go into producing a normal calendar in everyday use of a Hindu household, year in and year out, much less of the variety of slight differences in the said calendars from region to region - a good number are produced by independent sources all with the said astronomical calculations towards everyday astronomical facts for the year to come, and sold commercially, purchased and used regularly at homes - and all this in addition to the "normal" calendar with fixed weeks and months used for all official purposes simultaneously all over India, the one that western mind understands and thinks is the only one.

The said Hindu calendar, any and all of them, takes into account the real month (related to the moon, which is where the very word "month" originates, as does "man") and the real date thereof (which is the angle between three bodies in the solar system), and the fact that a day is different from a date - they need not begin or end simultaneously, but may, depending on the astronomical facts for the moment - is well understood in the country. (If anyone reading this has a headache, take two pills before attempting to figure that out.)

Other facts have been coming to light, since over half a century at the very least - for instance the fact that calculus was in India at least a century before Liebniz, Newton et al. Numbers of extremely high degree - according to a (non Indian) researcher, not conceptualised elsewhere before but dealth with in India - have been known and discovered in manuscripts to the tune of ten to the power ten to the power close to fifty. Rational numbers and fractions were dealt with to the tune of well over ten digits.

There have been manuscripts discovered - many locked under glass and never read yet in venerable institutions of learning in US, UK, etc - that tell a tale of a nation where flourishing schools of higher learning were disrupted by various onslaughts of marauding, murdering foreign armies and navies. In case of calculus it was the time of Portugese onslaught and the school dwindled away into nothing, survival being difficult when murdering soldiers are after you.

And yet Seife - or the person writing the description above in case that is not from the book - would have west believe that it is a lesser race that seems to worship zero, nothing, everything, anything, in need of conversion that waits on your dollars. And the gullible are thus separated from their hard earned pennies and pounds.

Incidentally, Seife does mean zero in German, I seem to remember, which amounts to a twofold pointer - one, the writer is displeased about his name being zero (i.e., possible to interpret as nothing, not even nobody but literally nothing) although his first name indicates that he is now living in an English speaking country, hence in an environment of questionable safety from ridicule (someone might know what seife means!) and hence he uses his German roots to both pull down a great nation, a great tradition and history, while making his own name seem to be an object of worship by those he aspires to look down on. The whole attempt merely reminds one of the nazi past of his roots attempting to relive.