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Bezig met laden... The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinitydoor Amir D. Aczel
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. The misleading subtitle probably is largely responsible for the poor reviews, though the early chapters that jump around quite a bit do it no favors. Overall, I enjoyed it as a easy-reading history of mathematics with specific focus on infinity and set theory, and brief biographies of Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel. To fully realize the promise of the the subtitle, it would've needed far more content exploring the historical intersection of mysticism and mathematics. ( ) I abandoned this book at least a decade ago, after reading only one chapter. It's a topic that I'm extremely interested in, but I just don't have a use for a book on this topic that's almost entirely without references. Flipping through the first chapter now in an attempt to remember why I found it so disappointing, this sentence stood out: "A great tribute to the Pythagoreans' intellectual achievements is the fact that they deduced the special place of the number 10 from an abstract mathematical argument rather than from counting the fingers on two hands." This seems pretty speculative; I can't help wondering whether the justification might have come *after* the idea that ten was special. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
"In the late 19th century, a brilliant mathematician languished in an asylum. His greatest accomplishment, the result of a series of leaps of insight, was his pioneering understanding of the nature of infinity. This is the story of Georg Cantor: how he came to his theories and the reverberations of his work, the consequences of which shape our world." "Cantor's theory of the infinite is famous for its many seeming contradictions: for example, we can prove there are as many points on a line one inch long as on a line one mile long; we can also prove that in all time there are as many years as there are days. According to Cantor, infinite sets are equal."
"The mind-twisting, deeply philosophical work of Cantor has its roots in ancient Greek mathematics and Jewish numerology as found in the mystical work known as the Kabbalah. Cantor used the term aleph - the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with all its attendant divine associations - to refer to the mysterious number which is the sum of positive integers. It is not the last positive number, because ... there is no last. It is the ultimate number that is always being approached: just as, for example, there is no last fraction before the number 1"--Jacket. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)511.3Natural sciences and mathematics Mathematics General Principles Mathematical (Symbolic) logicLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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