Saturday, November 23, 2013

Ian Stewart. Visions of Infinity. The Great Mathematical Problems.

Great book. How many good popular science books are there now! Mario Livio (see my review) is slightly surpasses him in style and historical erudition but Stewart may be even better in explaining mathematics in layman's terms.

D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, Penguin.




The bio of possibly the greatest American author of his generation (unless you are editorial assistant, reading his "Infinite Jest" requires a grant, which I did not receive) is more an D. T. Max' advertisement (For his parents? For Penguin editors?) that he graduated from Harvard.

An example: "But Kari encouraged him in his investigations [voluminous footnote], and by the time that he left for Syracuse he had blossomed into a committed therapand, as eager to ferret out the roots of his personal malaise as he'd once been to crack logical paradoxes."

Antony Padgen, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, Random House

Padgen gives quite a spirited description of Kant and surprising modernity of his political views. Otherwise, it is an obsessive screed declaring global political evolution of the last two centuries the brainwork of (Western) intellectuals. Had industrial revolution, two World Wars, revolutions in France, Russia and the third world had something to do with it? Silence.