Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

Hippasus of Metapontum stood on the deck, preparing to die. Around him stood the members of a cult, a secret brotherhood that he had betrayed. Hippasus had revealed a secret that was deadly to the Greek way of thinking, a secret that threatened to undermine the entire philosophy that the brotherhood had struggled to build. For revealing that secret, the great Pythagoras himself sentenced Hippasus to death by drowning. To protect their number-philosophy, the cult would kill. Yet as deadly as the secret that Hippasus revealed was, it was small compared to the dangers of zero. The leader of the cult was Pythagoras, an ancient radical. According to most accounts, he was born in the sixth century BC on Samos, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey famed for a temple to Hera and for really good wine. Even by the standards of the superstitious ancient Greeks, Pythagoras’s beliefs were eccentric. He was firmly convinced that he was the reincarnated soul of Euphorbus, a Trojan hero. This helped convince Pythagoras that all souls—including those of animals—transmigrated to other bodies after death. Because of this, he was a strict vegetarian. Beans, however, were taboo, as they generate flatulence and are like the genitalia.