Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.95 (608 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B00M4LU9UY |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 139 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-09-24 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
From the imperial cities of Germany to the green hills of Surrey, from the papal palace in Rome to the halls of the Royal Society of London, Alexander demonstrates how a disagreement over a mathematical concept became a contest over the heavens and the Earth. The concept was deemed dangerous and subversive, a threat to the belief that the world was an orderly place, governed by a strict and unchanging set of rules. The story takes us from the bloody battlefields of Europe's religious wars and the English Civil War and into the lives of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the day, including Galileo and Isaac Newton, Cardinal Bellarmine and Thomas Hobbes, and Christopher Clavius and John Wall
A Deeply Divisive Debate about Reality This book is much more than an esoteric history of an area of mathematics. It tracks the ancient rivalry between ‘rationalists’ and ‘empiricists’. The dominant rationalists have always believed that human minds (at least those possessed by educated intellectuals) are capable of understanding the world purely by thought alone. The empiricists acknowledge that reality is far too complicated for humans to ju. Matt Young said Fascinating but overdrawn. I like the book, though I found it a bit overlong and sometimes redundant. Further, I suspect that the author may have the cart before the horse in thinking that failure to study infinitesimals stultified Italy, rather than the other way round. Also, I sometimes found the going hard because the author failed to distinguish between an infinitesimal and an indivisible. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to learn that the Jesuits opp. Interesting, fascinating, enlightening. Isn't that what we're all looking for? Ken Blakely Interesting, fascinating, enlightening. Infinitesimal introduced me to concepts and characters I had never encountered and showed me how a long forgotten series of catfights among snooty-nosed intellectuals led us to the world we live in. The closest equivalent concept I have at hand is the struggle between Keynesian and Hayekian economics.At the same time, I got the feeling that the author had been paid for x pages, but his the