This is hard to review as it's on two opposite ends - fascinating subject satisfactorily explored and the purplest prose I've encountered. The history is dense, the math is surprisingly accessible, and the philosophy is heavily Christian.
Is it possible that Kaplan is a fan of Good Omens, or is it just coincidence that there are multiple references to things found in that book? Ussher's prediction of the exact hour when the world would end, "prestidigitation" in the same paragraph as angels dancing on the head of a pin, among others. Perhaps those were just common topics decades ago 😂. ( )

As much interesting history as anything else.

Remove a star if you hate history. ( )

Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero begins as a mystery story, taking us back to Sumerian times, and then to Greece and India, piecing together the way the idea of a symbol for nothing evolved.
Interesting to read. It is hard to imagine that there were times without „zero“ and how important it was to invent it.

Well-written, but prefer the Seife book on zero. This one is just a tiny bit ramblier, quick but not AS ingeniously phrased or structured.

This book has a ton of fake profundity, probably meant to be humourous and probably the most complete treatment of the Babylonian number system in a popular work. The first half of the book has a lot of fake profundity and very little mathematics, but the second part redresses the balance somewhat.

A brief discussion of individual chapters through chapter 10.

Chapter 1: Ancient number systems, including the Babylonian one. The Babylonian numbers in the book are aesthetically appealing.
Chapter 2 through 9: Fake profundity and a history of the concept and representation of zero.
Chapter 10: A bunch of abstract algebra presented lightly; deducing the necessary properties of 0 and confronting the predicament of 0^0 (which must be either 1 or 0 or possibly neither). Some simple group theory and the difference of squares technique for factoring polynomials. No general statements about when difference of squares is guaranteed to work, which disappoints me. ( )