July 2013
Intermediate to advanced
282 pages
6h 28m
English
Content preview from Good MathBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The History of Zero
In our pursuit of the meaning of zero, let’s start with a bit of history. Yes, there’s an actual history to zero!
If we were to go back in time and look at when people started working with numbers, we’d find that they had no concept of zero. Numbers really started out as very practical tools, primarily for measuring quantity. They were used to answer questions like “How much grain do we have stored away?” and “If we eat this much now, will we have enough to plant crops next season?” When you think about using numbers in a context like that, a measurement of zero doesn’t really mean much. A measurement can only make sense if there’s something to measure.
Even when math is applied to measurements in modern math, leading ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.