Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Language, Discourse, Society)

This book portrays the introduction of the mathematical sign zero as a major signifying event, both within the writing of numbers and as an emblem of parallel events in other sign systems.

Literature & Fiction

Rotman, Brian

History & Criticism

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics

This ambitious work puts forward a new account of mathematics-as-language that challenges the coherence of the accepted idea of infinity and suggests a startlingly new conception of counting. The author questions the familiar, classical, interpretation of whole numbers held by mathematicians and scientists, and replaces it with an original and radical alternative―what the author calls non-Euclidean arithmetic. The author's entry point is an attack on the notion of the mathematical infinite in both its potential and actual forms, an attack organized around his claim that any interpretation of "endless" or "unlimited" iteration is ineradicably theological. Going further than critique of the overt metaphysics enshrined in the prevailing Platonist description of mathematics, he uncovers a covert theism, an appeal to a disembodied ghost, deep inside the mathematical community's understanding of counting.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Stanford University Press

This ambitious work puts forward a new account of mathematics-as-language that challenges the coherence of the accepted idea of infinity and suggests a startlingly new conception of counting. The author questions the familiar, classical, interpretation of whole numbers held by mathematicians and scientists, and replaces it with an original and radical alternative―what the author calls non-Euclidean arithmetic. The author's entry point is an attack on the notion of the mathematical infinite in both its potential and actual forms, an attack organized around his claim that any interpretation of "endless" or "unlimited" iteration is ineradicably theological. Going further than critique of the overt metaphysics enshrined in the prevailing Platonist description of mathematics, he uncovers a covert theism, an appeal to a disembodied ghost, deep inside the mathematical community's understanding of counting.

Science & Math

This unusual book is a delightful analysis of the nature of zero as a sign intimately connected to the idea of nothing. Rotman draws interesting parallels using the textual code systems of mathematics, painting, and economic exchange and their respective meta-signs -- zero, the vanishing point, imaginary money -- which represent the absence of certain signs. Focusing on the Renaissance period, the author argues that the introduction of a meta-sign disrupts a code system that prompts the creating of new sign systems, as represented by the multifarious transitions from Roman to Hindu numerals, from iconic to perspective art, and from gold money to imaginary bank money. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach...Rotman builds a viable thesis for the semiotics of zero via a thorough examination of Montaigne's 'Essays,' Shakespeare's 'King Lear', the 'Kabbalah,' and Vermeer's paintings. - Choice

Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero

Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Writing Science)

Two features of mathematics stand out: its menagerie of seemingly eternal objects (numbers, spaces, patterns, functions, categories, morphisms, graphs, and so on), and the hieroglyphics of special notations, signs, symbols, and diagrams associated with them. The author challenges the widespread belief in the extra-human origins of these objects and the understanding of mathematics as either a purely mental activity about them or a formal game of manipulating symbols. Instead, he argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing. Mathematics as Sign addresses both aspects―mental and linguistic―of this machine. The opening essay, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics" (long acknowledged as a seminal contribution to its field), sets out the author's underlying model. According to this model, "doing" mathematics constitutes a kind of waking dream or thought experiment in which a proxy of the self is propelled around imagined worlds that are conjured into intersubjective being through signs. Other essays explore the status of these signs and the nature of mathematical objects, how mathematical ideograms and diagrams differ from each other and from written words, the probable fate of the real number continuum and calculus in the digital era, the manner in which Platonic and Aristotelean metaphysics are enshrined in the contemporary mathematical infinitude of endless counting, and the possibility of creating a new conception of the sequence of whole numbers based on what the author calls non-Euclidean counting. Reprising and going beyond the critique of number in Ad Infinitum, the essays in this volume offer an accessible insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called "one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics."

History & Philosophy

Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West’s dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia.Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

Duke University Press Books

Die Null und das Nichts.

Mathematics

Kulturverlag Kadmos Berli

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Books by Rotman, Brian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rotman, Brian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Language, Discourse, Society)

Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics

Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics

Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero

Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Writing Science)

Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Writing Science)

Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

Die Null und das Nichts.