It is hard to believe that there was once a time when zero didn't exist, but zero was a relatively recent invention; born as an Eastern philosophical concept its history is one of struggle and intrigue. This informative and easy-to-read book is the story of the people who battled over the meaning of the mysterious number - the scholars and mystics, the scientists and clergymen - who each tried to understand zero. It involves Archimedes, Aristotle, Newton and Stephen Hawking, and is a history of the paradoxes posed by this innocent-looking number, rattling even this century's biggest minds and threatening the unravel the whole framework of scientific thought. The story of zero involved not only mathematics but history. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy, of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution in the last millennium lay a zero.