Four kilometers from big temple of Angkor Wat, deeply in the Cambodian jungle, we open the doorway of a makeshift shed with a corrugated tin roofing system and went into a dusty area colored in pale-gray. A huge number of chunks and slabs of stone covered the dirt floor: smashed minds of sculptures of Khmer kings and Hindu gods, broken lintels and door structures from abandoned temples, the remains of steles with old writing. After many years of browsing, I would at long last emerged right here, hoping to find an individual dot chiseled into a reddish material, a humble tag of wonderful importance, emblematic that would become the most foundation of our amounts system—our very first zero.

It absolutely was a lifelong appreciate that directed us to this threshold. We grew up on a cruise ship when you look at the Mediterranean very often labeled as at Monte Carlo, and I also is interested in the alluring data on roulette rims: half of all of them red-colored, half black colored. Continue reading →