Zero to infinity : a history of numbers / Edward B. Burger.

"Lecture transcript and course guidebook"--Cover.

Includes bibliographical references.

Series of twenty-four lectures by Edward Burger in which he discusses the historical evolution of the representation of numbers for communication and manipulation and the intrinsic structure of those numbers.

Part 1. Lecture 1. The ever-evolving notion of number -- Lecture 2. The dawn of numbers -- Lecture 3. Speaking the language of numbers -- Lecture 4. The dramatic digits, the power of zero -- Lecture 5. The magical and spiritual allure of numbers -- Lecture 6. Nature's numbers, patterns without people -- Lecture 7. Numbers of prime importance -- Lecture 8. Challenging the rationality of numbers -- Lecture 9. Walk the (number) line -- Lecture 10. The commonplace chaos among real numbers -- Lecture 11. A beautiful dusting of zeroes and twos -- Lecture 12. An intuitive sojourn into arithmetic -- Part 2. Lecture 13. The story of [pi] -- Lecture 14. The story of Euler's e -- Lecture 15. Transcendental numbers -- Lecture 16. An algebraic approach to numbers -- Lecture 17. The five most important numbers -- Lecture 18. An analytic approach to numbers -- Lecture 19. A new breed of numbers -- Lecture 20. The notion of transfinite numbers -- Lecture 21. Collections too infinite to count -- Lecture 22. In and out, the road to a third infinity -- Lecture 23. Infinity, what we know and what we don't -- Lecture 24. The endless frontier of number.