The Sumerians and Mayans flirted with zero, but failed to find it. The Greeks feared it as representing a great nothingness, a void, while the Roman Catholic Church condemned it as the work of the devil. The History of Numbers: Zero traces how zero grew from a harmless placeholder to an idea that shook the intellectual and religious life of the European and Islamic worlds-and changed not only how humanity worked with numbers but how we came to view the universe. Book jacket.