Want all the comment bank files emailed to you?

Please click here and send me a small donation for a new school project. I plan to use the money to buy a class set of Kindles for my small Romanian school, so they can read more English language books. Every little donation will really help!

In return, I will email you the zipped file, containing all the files for you to share with your school friends.

Welcome to Freeducation - the Home of Free Teaching Resources

Zero - The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea - by Charles Seife

I love to read popular science books. I got this one as a gift, and I was so excited about getting it. I showed it to my Romanian Father - in law - and he immediately became very excited, as in his own brief case was the same book (naturally in Romanian!), and so any more recommendation for a book was not needed for me.

I spend the next few days reading all about Zero while travelling back and forth on the underground system. It was a wonderful read, as it made me think of everything I never really had grasped - such as why light travels at the same speed everywhere, and how I can travel back in time (it tells you in a rather tongue way how to build your own time machine!).

I really liked it for its simple way of explaining the History of the Zero from cavemen where the numbers were, 1, 2, many (I would love to have done my SATs tests in those days!), to the Egyptians, Romans and Greeks, who all decided zero did not need to exist.

The later parts of the book looked at how zero had influenced different sciences, and ended up with Quantum Mechanics, which as fas I can work out, everything seems to go! I love to read about black holes and so I was in my element, along with infinities bound up in bigger infinities, which were bound up in ever large subsets... I did warn you that this book really makes you think hard! The nice thing about this book was the fact that the author is always holding your hand and guiding you through it, so at no time do you feel very lost... and if you do, you just go back a few pages, and read it again it all seems to slot together.

It is for anyone who loves maths, ironically, I read it and thought I really must send it to my father who would love this book and as my brain was so full of particles which can appear and disappear, I had completely forgotten for a few seconds that he had died without ever reading it! Make sure you read it before you die!