Zero a biography

Zero hit the USS Yorktown like a torpedo.

On September 21, 1997, while cruising off the coast of Virginia, the billion-dollar missile cruiser shuddered to a halt. Yorktown was dead in the water.

Warships are designed to withstand the strike of a torpedo or the blast of a mine.

Thought it was armored against weapons, nobody had thought to defend the Yorktown from zero. It was a grave mistake.

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Praise for Zero

“Mathematicians, contrary to popular misconception, are often the most lucid of writers (Bertrand Russell won a Nobel Prize not in mathematics but in literature), and Seife is a welcome example.

He writes with an understated charm that takes account of human fear, the mistakes of geniuses and the mind’s grandest ambitions.”

—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Zero emerges as a daunting intellectual riddle in this fascinating chronicle.

With remarkable economy, Seife urges his readers to peer through the zero down into the abyss of absolute emptiness and out into the infini