Perspective

Currently employed as an associate professor of journalism at New York University's Carter Journalism Institute, Charles Seife is the author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous idea and three other books. He regularly writes on mathematics and physics for popular audiences. Seife has been a writer for the magazine Science and the New Scientist. He holds mathematics degrees from Princeton and Yale.

Seife is arguably the most important person in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea because it is his stylized history of zero that draws the narrative together. Seife goes out of his way to personify zero in order to use it as an organizational concept for discussing the history of the fields of physics and math. Seife's place in the book, therefore, reflects his interest in mixing his backgrounds in mathematics and journalism. While no mathematician would tell the story of the evolution of...