Zero

Alex Bellos Unlike Ifrah, Charles Seife is a brilliant popular science writer who has here written the ‘biography’ of zero. And even though he doesn’t talk that much about India, it works well as a handbook to Ifrah’s sections on India. Because Seife talks about how zero is mathematically very close to the idea of infinity, which is another mathematical idea that the Indians thought about differently. Seife gives you the context and it explains why, really, without zero, you can’t do anything. The difficulty of understanding zero is similar to the difficulty of understanding infinity. The Greeks had no... (Source)

Bryan Johnson Chronicles how hard it was for humanity to come up with and hold onto the concept of zero. No zero, no math. No zero, no engineering. No zero, no modern world as we know it... (Source)