It was not too long ago--relatively speaking--that the concept of zero was very controversial. Part of the reason our word for zero comes from Arabic is because the Islamic mathematicians used it for Algebra, another Arabic-origin word. Well out of this single number for nothing was born an entire set of numbers, all of them less than nothing! It took math and engineering experts thousands of years to wrap their heads around them, so it's okay if we find them difficult too.

In this class...