Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)’s Reviews > The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero > Status Update

"I made it difficult," Newton told a friend, "to avoid being bated by little smatterers in mathematics."

"Make yourself comfortable and have with your tasting a meringue, a dish of trifle or any of the frothy confections they called in Elizabethan times 'empty dishes.'"

"... zero was the villain again, since it could be turned into a 6 or a 9 by the unscrupulous, who could also slip in a digit or two before it. So in Florence the City Council passed an ordinance in 1299 making it illegal to use numbers when entering amounts of money in account books: sums had to be written out in words." - as we still do when we write checks.

"Dividing was difficult on the (counting) board - so difficult in fact that one way of doing it was called 'iron division' (divisio ferrea), because it was 'so extraordinarily difficult that its harness surpassed that of iron.'

Mayans: "The Long Count held out the promise that time wouldn't stop for an immense span indeed. A system of dating we find on some of their monuments acted like the service coupons that come with your new car: if there is a voucher for a 50,000 mile checkup you feel confident that your car will be coming to maturity then. If there is none at 150,000 miles, a shiver runs through you."

Mayans: "... every five years... their king spectacularly mutilated himself that his blood might keep the thirsty gods at their task. As a pair of scholars put it, blood was the mortar of ancient Maya life."

"The Mayan symbol for zero was a tattooed man in a necklace with his head thrown back. Or at least this was one of their astonishing array of zero-symbols."

"... but infinity isn't a number (it isn't even a stupid number, as children think who mistranslate the Latin Infinitus est numerus stultorum: infinite is the number of fools.)" - I do love aside remarks to the reader like this.

In Bhaskara's Lilavati ('Charming Girl') : " 'Beautiful and dear delightful girl, whose eyes are like a faun's! If you are skilled in multiplication, tell me, what is 135 times 12?' They don't write math books like that any more."