INFINITE ASCENT: A SHORT HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS (MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES) BY DAVID BERLINSKI
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Invest your time also for simply few mins to review a publication Infinite Ascent: A Short History Of Mathematics (Modern Library Chronicles) By David Berlinski Reviewing a book will certainly never ever minimize as well as lose your time to be useless. Checking out, for some people come to be a need that is to do everyday such as spending quality time for consuming. Now, just what regarding you? Do you want to review a book? Now, we will reveal you a brandnew e-book qualified Infinite Ascent: A Short History Of Mathematics (Modern Library Chronicles) By David Berlinski that could be a new method to check out the understanding. When reading this book, you can obtain one point to always bear in mind in every reading time, also tip by step.
From Publishers Weekly No one knows for sure when mathematics went from being a functional system for keeping track of sheep to a philosophical system that transcended the objects it counted, but as well-known science writer Berlinski (Tour of the Calculus) tells readers, around 500 B.C. Pythagoras elevated mathematics into a religion. It has kept its near-mystical status ever since. (Even students instructed in its arcane languages can only gape at how numbers dictated where missing elementary particles like positrons and quarks were to be found.). Readers may have heard of the short-lived Évariste Galois, killed in a duel over a woman, but here they will come to understand his importance to group theory, his thoughts scribbled down the night before his death. Non-Euclidean geometry led to Einstein's universe, and Berlinski introduces us to the German scientists who opened the door to multiverses: Gauss, Cantor and Riemann. Finally, we encounter Kurt Gödel, who threw the acolytes of mathematics into a panic with his incompleteness theorem. Readers will need to remember some of their high school math to benefit from Berlinski's discussions of calculus and complex numbers, but his engaging style should attract many readers, science buffs and generalists alike to this excellent entry in Modern Library's Chronicles series. (On sale Sept. 6) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Mathematicians are people, too, and come in all types: mystics such as Pythagoras, misanthropes like Newton. Along with Euclid, Descartes, Leibniz, Euler, Gauss, Galois, Riemann, Cantor, and Godel, they animate Berlinski's lively history of the least popular school subject. Yet even solid-C survivors of geometry can recall math's rhapsodic allure in a problem solved or a window opened on some cosmic truth, such as Euclid's axiom that through a point off a line, there passes only one line parallel to the other line. Alas, as Berlinski archly elaborates, this self-evident idea bugged centuries of mathematicians doubtful about its validity, as have many things in math ever since Pythagoras freaked out about irrational numbers. Berlinski has a light but incisive style by which he conveys the inner turmoil and triumph, or tragedy in the case of 20-year-old Evariste Galois, who
invented group theory the night before he was killed in an 1832 duel, an invention marking the greatest discoveries in mathematical history. Subtly instilling the interconnectedness of the specific concepts, Berlinski releases math from its textbook script and restores its majestic drama. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review “For mathematically challenged folk like me, David Berlinski comes again to help with a thin volume that, like his A Tour of the Calculus, renders mathematics not easy, but accessible and absorbing. He portrays through history how mathematical thought evolved, from the genius of the few to its application by the many. Personalities, times, cultures, and opportunities all play their dramatic roles and Berlinski, knowing how they interacted, brings them vividly to life. You’ll enjoy yourself.” –Paul McHugh, Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University “This is literary science at its best. I was charmed by this top-down and introspective presentation of the subject of mathematics. It is not just highly readable; because it is one step above the subject, it can even inspire the professional.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of Fooled by Randomness “A humorous and graceful short history of mathematics, quite deceptively easy to read. Berlinski is actually a sophisticated insider, and every page of this book glows with his love of mathematics and with his sardonic appreciation for humanity’s foibles.” –Gregory Chaitin, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, author of Meta Math! The Quest for Omega
From the Hardcover edition.
INFINITE ASCENT: A SHORT HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS (MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES) BY DAVID BERLINSKI PDF
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INFINITE ASCENT: A SHORT HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS (MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES) BY DAVID BERLINSKI PDF
In Infinite Ascent, David Berlinski, the acclaimed author of The Advent of the Algorithm, A Tour of the Calculus, and Newton’s Gift, tells the story of mathematics, bringing to life with wit, elegance, and deep insight a 2,500-year-long intellectual adventure. Berlinski focuses on the ten most important breakthroughs in mathematical history–and the men behind them. Here are Pythagoras, intoxicated by the mystical significance of numbers; Euclid, who gave the world the very idea of a proof; Leibniz and Newton, co-discoverers of the calculus; Cantor, master of the infinite; and Gödel, who in one magnificent proof placed everything in doubt. The elaboration of mathematical knowledge has meant nothing less than the unfolding of human consciousness itself. With his unmatched ability to make abstract ideas concrete and approachable, Berlinski both tells an engrossing tale and introduces us to the full power of what surely ranks as one of the greatest of all human endeavors.
From the Hardcover edition. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Sales Rank: #945198 in Books Brand: Brand: Modern Library Published on: 2008-01-08 Released on: 2008-01-08 Original language: English Number of items: 1 Dimensions: 7.99" h x .48" w x 5.15" l, .36 pounds Binding: Paperback 224 pages
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From Publishers Weekly No one knows for sure when mathematics went from being a functional system for keeping track of sheep to a philosophical system that transcended the objects it counted, but as well-known science writer Berlinski (Tour of the Calculus) tells readers, around 500 B.C. Pythagoras elevated mathematics into a religion. It has kept its near-mystical status ever since. (Even students instructed in its arcane languages can only gape at how numbers dictated where missing elementary particles like positrons and quarks were to be found.). Readers may have heard of the short-lived Évariste Galois, killed in a duel over a woman, but here they will come to understand his
importance to group theory, his thoughts scribbled down the night before his death. Non-Euclidean geometry led to Einstein's universe, and Berlinski introduces us to the German scientists who opened the door to multiverses: Gauss, Cantor and Riemann. Finally, we encounter Kurt Gödel, who threw the acolytes of mathematics into a panic with his incompleteness theorem. Readers will need to remember some of their high school math to benefit from Berlinski's discussions of calculus and complex numbers, but his engaging style should attract many readers, science buffs and generalists alike to this excellent entry in Modern Library's Chronicles series. (On sale Sept. 6) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Mathematicians are people, too, and come in all types: mystics such as Pythagoras, misanthropes like Newton. Along with Euclid, Descartes, Leibniz, Euler, Gauss, Galois, Riemann, Cantor, and Godel, they animate Berlinski's lively history of the least popular school subject. Yet even solid-C survivors of geometry can recall math's rhapsodic allure in a problem solved or a window opened on some cosmic truth, such as Euclid's axiom that through a point off a line, there passes only one line parallel to the other line. Alas, as Berlinski archly elaborates, this self-evident idea bugged centuries of mathematicians doubtful about its validity, as have many things in math ever since Pythagoras freaked out about irrational numbers. Berlinski has a light but incisive style by which he conveys the inner turmoil and triumph, or tragedy in the case of 20-year-old Evariste Galois, who invented group theory the night before he was killed in an 1832 duel, an invention marking the greatest discoveries in mathematical history. Subtly instilling the interconnectedness of the specific concepts, Berlinski releases math from its textbook script and restores its majestic drama. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review “For mathematically challenged folk like me, David Berlinski comes again to help with a thin volume that, like his A Tour of the Calculus, renders mathematics not easy, but accessible and absorbing. He portrays through history how mathematical thought evolved, from the genius of the few to its application by the many. Personalities, times, cultures, and opportunities all play their dramatic roles and Berlinski, knowing how they interacted, brings them vividly to life. You’ll enjoy yourself.” –Paul McHugh, Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University “This is literary science at its best. I was charmed by this top-down and introspective presentation of the subject of mathematics. It is not just highly readable; because it is one step above the subject, it can even inspire the professional.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of Fooled by Randomness “A humorous and graceful short history of mathematics, quite deceptively easy to read. Berlinski is actually a sophisticated insider, and every page of this book glows with his love of mathematics and with his sardonic appreciation for humanity’s foibles.” –Gregory Chaitin, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, author of Meta Math! The Quest for Omega
From the Hardcover edition. Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful. A quirky commentary rather than a history By Camber The first thing to say is that this book isn't a "short history of mathematics," as the subtitle indicates. Rather, it's a commentary on a handful of key developments in mathematics, namely numbers, proof, analytic geometry, calculus, complex numbers, groups, non-Euclidean (and Euclidean) geometry, sets, and Godel's theorems. David Berlinski is surely brilliant and erudite (and he clearly wants us to realize that), but he's also a quirky fellow who has never really "fit in" with polite academic society, perhaps not even society in general. Stylistically, this book reflects its author, with Berlinski constantly making all sorts of tangential remarks. Overall, I did find his remarks to invigorate the book and entertain, but they don't add much insight. Moreover, some of his remarks are just plain weird and have no place in the book, especially his perverse sexual remarks (and it's telling that he couldn't resist putting them in the book). As far as presenting information about mathematics, this book is rather weak. If you don't already know the mathematics, you won't be able to learn it effectively from this book, since Berlinski compromises clarity for cleverness. And if you do already know the mathematics, you'll still have to do some work to fill in the frequent gaps in Berlinski's presentation. I was also a bit disappointed that Berlinski didn't suggest any further reading; as a non-mathematician with a serious interest in mathematics, surely he could have told like-minded readers about some of the books he's personally found helpful? Overall, I think this book merits 4 stars for entertainment value but only 2 stars for content delivery, so a net 3 stars. With a more honest title like "Comments on Some Milestones of Mathematics," I could have rated this book 4 stars. Since it's a quick read, I can still recommend this book to the mathematically initiated who are looking for entertainment. But I can't recommend it to readers with limited mathematics background, nor to readers looking for a genuine history of mathematics. Personally, I enjoyed this book, but learned almost nothing. 75 of 86 people found the following review helpful. An Ill-Conceived Practical Joke? By Christopher Grant At the time that I ordered this book, I had a natural inclination to be sympathetic with its author, since his reputation indicated that he and I had similar views about politics and the philosophy of science. That only increased my disappointment when this ended up being one of the least enlightening and most annoying books I've ever encountered. If Berlinski is as talented as I'd been led to believe, it's hard not to interpret _Infinite Ascent_ as either some sort of practical joke or a rush job to fulfill a contract. In _Infinite Ascent_, Berlinski has a tendency to wax grandiloquent, using metaphors and similes that serve no evident purpose and are sometimes downright bizarre, as when, for example, he likens sets and their elements to the male anatomy (p. 129). Following this up one page later with Berlinski's fantasy about schoolgirls with "their starched shirt fronts covering their gently heaving bosoms" (p. 130) does nothing to ameliorate concern about the author's tendency to get distracted.
One of Berlinski's running themes is the use of "..." in mathematics to represent the continuation of a pattern. He likes to joke about this so much that he starts inserting these dots in his formulas needlessly, just to get to comment on them. For example, instead of just writing down the (extremely short) formula for subtracting complex numbers (p. 69), he leaves an ellipsis and then states that "the crutch of three dots [covers] the transmogrification of a plus to a minus sign and nothing more." Some of Berlinski's comments are real head-stratchers: "[The Elements] is very clear, succint as a knife blade. And like every good textbook, it is incomprehensible." (p. 14); "[Exponential functions] mount up inexorably, one reason that they are often used to represent doubling processes in biology, as when undergraduates divide uncontrollably within a Petri dish." (p. 71). Huh? _Infinite Ascent_ has few formulas or other concrete mathematical details, and what there is is often wrong. The formulas for the solutions to quartic equations of quadratic type are botched (p. 93), roots of equations are confused with zeros of functions (p. 80), inscribed rectangles are described while circumscribed rectangles are drawn (p. 56), and g12*du1*du2 is misidentified as a formula for the infinitesimal distance between the points u1 and u2 (p. 120). The sections on logic are the ones Berlinski handles most competently, but even that has been covered better by many others. Berlinski thinks that Weierstrass's definition of limit is "infinitely wearisome" (p. 145) and is "promptly forgotten" by mathematicians after they have learned it. I think most analysts would disagree strongly with his opinion, and would classify the definition of limit among those things they couldn't forget if they wanted to. (That Berlinski himself very well might have forgotten it is suggested by his unconventional decision to use the letter delta to represent a *large* index (p. 61) in his definition of the limit of a sequence.) Berlinski opines that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (connecting differentiation to definite integration) is something that "no one at all would expect". On the contrary, I consider it to be eminently plausible. Berlinski also describes the classic math book _Counterexamples in Analysis_ as consisting of "a series of misleading proofs supporting theorems that are not theorems." _Counterexamples in Analysis_ actually contains nothing of the sort. Rather than containing fallacious "proofs" of non-theorems, it contains exactly what its title says it does: Counterexamples (i.e., examples that show why the hypotheses of (true) theorems are necessary and why stronger conclusions are unwarranted). 9 of 15 people found the following review helpful. A VERY BRIEF BUT READABLE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS By Mead C. Whorton Jr. Berlinski has a first class mind and it shows in this succinct but excellent history of mathematics. All of the giants of mathematics are here from Pythagoras to Descartes to Newton and Lebiniz, who invented calculus ,to Cantor and his theory of infinite sets to Godel and his famous Incompleteness Theorem. And Berlinski's vivid prose brings each of these mathematical giants to life. The chapter on Evariste Galois, inventor of group theory, who died at the age of twenty in a duel is superb. This chapter leaves one with the feeling that you have briefly walked in the world of Galois. In conclusion, Infinite Ascent is well written with just the right level of mathematical sophistication and it covers 2500 years of mathematical history in a mere 197 pages. I would also strongly suggest
THE ADVENT OF THE ALGORITHM, NEWTON'S GIFT, and especially A TOUR OF THE CALCULUS all by Mr. Berlinski. See all 27 customer reviews...
INFINITE ASCENT: A SHORT HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS (MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES) BY DAVID BERLINSKI PDF
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concepts, Berlinski releases math from its textbook script and restores its majestic drama. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review “For mathematically challenged folk like me, David Berlinski comes again to help with a thin volume that, like his A Tour of the Calculus, renders mathematics not easy, but accessible and absorbing. He portrays through history how mathematical thought evolved, from the genius of the few to its application by the many. Personalities, times, cultures, and opportunities all play their dramatic roles and Berlinski, knowing how they interacted, brings them vividly to life. You’ll enjoy yourself.” –Paul McHugh, Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University “This is literary science at its best. I was charmed by this top-down and introspective presentation of the subject of mathematics. It is not just highly readable; because it is one step above the subject, it can even inspire the professional.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of Fooled by Randomness “A humorous and graceful short history of mathematics, quite deceptively easy to read. Berlinski is actually a sophisticated insider, and every page of this book glows with his love of mathematics and with his sardonic appreciation for humanity’s foibles.” –Gregory Chaitin, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, author of Meta Math! The Quest for Omega
From the Hardcover edition.
Invest your time also for simply few mins to review a publication Infinite Ascent: A Short History Of Mathematics (Modern Library Chronicles) By David Berlinski Reviewing a book will certainly never ever minimize as well as lose your time to be useless. Checking out, for some people come to be a need that is to do everyday such as spending quality time for consuming. Now, just what regarding you? Do you want to review a book? Now, we will reveal you a brandnew e-book qualified Infinite Ascent: A Short History Of Mathematics (Modern Library Chronicles) By David Berlinski that could be a new method to check out the understanding. When reading this book, you can obtain one point to always bear in mind in every reading time, also tip by step.
