Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Summary:
 In this section of the book a mathematician idea of creating the probability theory is brought up. This man was named Pascal and his reason for making this was for the rich people of his society to win more money in gambling. I thought it was for a more education purpose, but I guess not. His experiments included amounts of money and the chance of winning it, and here zero popped up. There was a chance of winning nothing and this theory was needed by some of these people to understand that. A problem that Descartes( a mathematician ) did not like more than zero was the number you got when a negative number was square rooted. That was its own little situation and the way he dealt with it was simply, just call those numbers "i". Back to zero, tangent lines was used to deal with this number. All one had to do was think of random points and find their slope and that would be thier tangent line. As one decreases the distance between the two lines, zero is approached and to some people that was meaningless. Through experiments like this, Calculus was brought up and zero was ignored for a while, but then people noticed they had to deal with it no matter what.
Quote:
 "...he came up with a scornful name for the square roots of negatives: imaginary numbers"( Seife 134 ).
Reaction:
 My first reaction was that I was learning this in my math class and it was kind of confusing, but I got a hold of it later on. To see that a good mathematician had trouble with it like me was a little cool in a sense. In my mind i have to accept that there is this imaginary number that can be squared to get a negative number. I am just going to accept the rules and go with it here.