The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men
A Cultural History
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Do numbers truly exist? What sort of reality do formulas describe?
The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes.
In this elegant book, mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, ranging widely from the paradoxes of ancient Greece to the sacred altars of India, from Mesopotamian calculus to our own contemporary obsession with algorithms.
Masterful and illuminating, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men transforms our understanding of mathematical thinking, showing that it is inextricably linked with the philosophical and the religious as well as the mundane - and, indeed, with our own very human experience of the universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zellini (A Brief History of Infinity), a University of Rome math professor, provides an elegant but frustrating treatise about his discipline's larger implications. Posing the question "Are numbers real entities?" he traces the ceaseless search for "the ultimate reality" of math, from the early Greeks, for whom "numbers were the last defense of an unfolding existence," to Bertrand Russell, under whose scrutiny rational and irrational numbers, created as abstract mathematical tools, "inherited the actual and real nature of physical concepts." However, discoveries about the inability of numbers to fully capture reality led in the early 20th century to a "crisis in the fundamentals" of math, further leading to the development of the algorithm as a "new kind of abstraction" allowing for "large, automatic calculations." But beyond explaining that this proved useful in the digital revolution, he does not show how his discipline's evolution influenced broader developments in world culture and history. At the most, he shows how mathematical concepts intersected with philosophy, such as L.E.J. Brouwer's understanding of the human thought process as a temporal sequence similar to an iterative calculation. While mathematicians may savor this work, Zellini's rendering of math as "cultural history" will leave most readers unconvinced.