7/6/22

The chapters on historical development are great. Math is so often presented as a fait accompli, it's nice to be reminded that it has a messy, non-linear history, just like every other human endeavor. The latter chapters on the state of math research as Kline saw it in the late 70s were tedious. ( )

Rather dry. Probably worth a second pass. ( )

In spite of a fascinating subject--the way the once-monolithic field of Mathematics has splintered over the past two centuries into competing, contradictory factions--I had to give up on this book because of the poor writing. Any book that begins with the sentence "ANY CIVILIZATION WORTHY OF THE APPELLATION HAS SOUGHT TRUTHS" is already facing an extreme uphill battle with me (the ALL CAPS is there in the text. Really). It keeps going. Chapter 2 opens with " THE MAJESTIC GREEK CIVILIZATION WAS DESTROYED BY SEVERAL FORCES." Clearly Professor Kline would have benefitted from a few courses in Freshman Composition while teaching at NYU... this is the kind of classically bad writing you get from 17 year olds trying to say something important and not yet knowing how.

Kline could have benefited from taking a few Humanities courses, too. The introduction is a hysteria of blather about how nothing is certain any longer--ok, to whom is this news? Have we not been thinking about this problem at least since Galileo published Starry Messenger? Did Morris Kline never read Hamlet?

Ok, I feel slightly bad slamming the book of a deceased scholar who tried valiantly throughout his life to reform mathematics education. Maybe this is a book he knocked off when he was too busy in the real world to worry about his writing. ( )