For math professor Kaplan, the history of zero is a lens for looking not only into the evolution of mathematics but into very nature of human thought. "Where did the familiar hollow circle that we use to denote zero come from? That's a...

Who hasn't feared the math Minotaur in its labyrinth of abstractions? The subject can seem convoluted and forbidding. Yet to do mathematics is to wrestle with "accessible mysteries"-and Out of the Labyrinth shows how exhilarating the...