I finished reading Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. It was a fascinating book–at least the portions I could understand.

As I was struggling thought the mathematical formulas in the text, I realized that I read differently than many of my students. I am comfortable in my not understanding portions of what I read. I realize that I do not need to understand everything; that I can take as much as I can from the text. I can go back over passages that I do not understand at a later time. I can do additional research on concepts I do not know. I also know that I don’t need to understand everything I encounter. For example, I was reading The Nothing that Is to learn more about cultural history. The mathematical formulas were not a primary part of my research (even though I was excited by what I was able to understand; especially how we can get whole numbers out of null sets).

I think that some students might get turned off to research because they think that they need to know everything the first time they read it; something that is definitely not the case. I really appreciated the number of literary, cultural, artistic, and other references made throughout Kaplan’s book. But I was not bothered by the references I did not know. Generally, I could understand his point without knowing the allusion. But I could see how a student could become bogged down in the allusions and therefore cause a desire to set aside the book.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD