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The Art of the Infinite - The Pleasures of Mathematics (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,043
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The Art of the Infinite - The Pleasures of Mathematics (Paperback)
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Total price: R1,063
Discovery Miles: 10 630
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Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero was
an international best-seller, translated into ten languages. The
Times called it "elegant, discursive, and littered with quotes and
allusions from Aquinas via Gershwin to Woolf" and The Philadelphia
Inquirer praised it as "absolutely scintillating."
In this delightful new book, Robert Kaplan, writing together with
his wife Ellen Kaplan, once again takes us on a witty, literate,
and accessible tour of the world of mathematics. Where The Nothing
That Is looked at math through the lens of zero, The Art of the
Infinite takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone
for understanding mathematical thinking. Tracing a path from
Pythagoras, whose great Theorem led inexorably to a discovery that
his followers tried in vain to keep secret (the existence of
irrational numbers); through Descartes and Leibniz; to the
brilliant, haunted Georg Cantor, who proved that infinity can come
in different sizes, the Kaplans show how the attempt to grasp the
ungraspable embodies the essence of mathematics. The Kaplans guide
us through the "Republic of Numbers," where we meet both its
upstanding citizens and more shadowy dwellers; and we travel across
the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines
meet. Along the way, deft character studies of great mathematicians
(and equally colorful lesser ones) illustrate the opposed yet
intertwined modes of mathematical thinking: the intutionist notion
that we discover mathematical truth as it exists, and the formalist
belief that math is true because we invent consistent rules for it.
"Less than All," wrote William Blake, "cannot satisfy Man." The
Art of the Infinite shows us some of the ways that Man has grappled
with All, and reveals mathematics as one of the most exhilarating
expressions of the human imagination.
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