The latest book from Amir Aczel, who has written previously about the compass, the Large Hadron Collider, and Fermat's Last Theorem, is Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers...in particular, the number zero.
Finding Zero is an adventure filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof.
The NY Times has a review of the book, written by another Amir, Amir Alexander, who wrote a recent book on infinitesimals, aka very nearly zero. (via @pomeranian99)
