A Brief History is a series of books that give a primer on various topics. This particular one is about Infinity, the Quest to Think the Unthinkable. it chronicles the struggle our civilization has had with the concept of infinity, from the early days of Greek philosophers, through the beginnings of calculus and to present day.

I thought it was risky buying this book because it could turn out to be exceedingly boring (hey it’s about math); but there is a lot of history intertwined within it and actually fairly little math. The math part, is of course pretty basic and accessible since I guess the target audience is not assumed to be Math major or anything. By the end of the book however, it did start to get a bit confusing and hair-splicing.

Infinity is also a bit of a misnomer, because it doesn’t just talk about really large numbers, it also talks about 0 — that is 1 over a Very Large Number. There are several interesting stories that stick out, such as how the Greeks had no concept of 0, or how there was a lot of politics involved for Newton to get the credit for Calculus (vs Leibowitz).

One thing that struck me when I read this book was how dumb* mathematicians of old were. Why couldn’t they believe in the existence of irrational numbers? Or that a continuous line from 0 to 1 can be broken down into infintesimal sections? Our understanding of this seems so basic, kindergarden really, yet esteemed mathematicians of centuries prior simply did not believe they could exist. This reminds me of the episode in Stargate SG-1 where the earthlings meet a more technologically advanced culture of other humans. They make a side remark that quantum physics was wrong and the earth scientist was all like: what?? how could that be? it’s the basis of our science. I guess the advanced research that we do now permeates down through the education system until the concepts are introduced early and ingrained in our minds.

* and by dumb, I mean misinformed

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: math, reading