Week 1: Shape of the Earth Video Response

As Kerry points out in his Shape of the Earth video, there can be a great diversity of what we would call scientific knowledge (or lack thereof) in any given culture at any given time. So, for example, there can be flat-earthers who denied that the earth is round, or - more controversially even today - there can be climate-change-deniers or evolution-deniers today, etc. etc. We can probably never expect uniformity of scientific belief in any given culture exactly because science itself is always in motion, as Kosta points out, and we are never going to be aware of our own ignorance, so to speak.

As my contribution to this topic, I wanted to share two book recommendations. Both of these books provide a cultural and historical context for two scientific phenomena that we learn about as children and take for granted: the existence of dinosaurs as attested in the fossil record and the existence (if we can call it that!) of the number zero.

The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (2000, reissued  2011) by Adrienne Mayor

This is a book that explores in great detail the ancient Greek and Roman interpretations of the fossil bones that they discovered. It's a wonderful topic, and Mayor works with all kinds of textual evidence and also with visual evidence, such as this Greek vase painting shown on the cover of the first edition of the book (I was sad to see they changed the cover for the reissue in 2011; I liked the old cover so much better):

I should add that Adrienne Mayor came to speak at OU back in 2001 (I think that is the right year), and she has to be one of the most fascinating people that I have ever met!

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

What could be more obvious than zero... right? Wrong! This book is a wonderful overview of the long and slow discovery of zero! By the end of the book you will feel very smart that you grasp the number zero and understand it easily... but you shouldn't feel too smug about that: by seeing how long and how hard it was to come to grips with the idea of zero, it makes you realize that there are some other things that later generations will consider totally obvious that we have somehow failed to see at all!

A mathematician friend told me that there are better books about zero out there, but this is the one that I happened to read and I enjoyed it very much. If someone who knows more about history of math can comment here on that and recommend more "zero" books to read, that would be super! :-)