Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Charles Seife is an American journalist and author and a professor of journalism at New York University, where he is the director of undergraduate and graduate studies under the university’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Seife developed his writing talents in college and subsequently obtained a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Princeton University, a master of science in mathematics from Yale University, and a master of science in journalism from Columbia University. He began his professional writing career in 1994 with an article in The Sciences profiling the famous mathematician John Conway; the article’s title labels Conway a “mathemagician” and “trickster,” suggesting that Seife admires Conway not merely for his intellect but for a playful yet reverent attitude toward mathematics. Seife has a similar perspective in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea; he handles his topic with a combination of excitement and awe rather than with strict scientific objectivity.

Before his professorship Seife wrote for Science magazine, New Scientist, and several other publishers. Miscellaneous works of his have continued to appear in The Economist, Scientific American, ProPublica, Discover, Smithsonian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He also contributed to the Science Channel’s 2004 series “100 Greatest Discoveries” and the 2005 BBC documentary “The Story of 1,” a historical account of the invention and innovation of numbers. In 2022, Seife penned an article for Slate examining how the invasion of AI-generated articles into reputable science journals reveals the weakness of the peer-review process.

Seife has published several books, all nonfiction. Zero was his first book, released in 2000. Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe (2003) connects to and expands on Zero in its survey of ancient and contemporary cosmology. Other works include Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes (2005), an exploration of information theory; Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008), a critical look at the failures of attempts to harness nuclear fusion; Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (2010), an analysis of mathematical misinformation; Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It’s True? (2014), a guide to discerning truth from falsehood online; and finally Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity (2021), a biography of physicist Stephen Hawking in which Seife argues that the man’s fame was as much a product of his charismatic self-promotion as his brilliance.