» God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great compendium
Comment: Great compendium of (some of) the most important works in math. I would have added some authors but I think the selection is awesome. Clearly explained and original works are well referenced.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: My son liked his Christmas gift
Comment: My son asked for this book for Christmas, so I bought it for him. Looking inside, I saw it was way over my head. But he, being a math and computer genius, loved it.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Shout for joy or toss it?
Comment: To evaluate my comments, I think you should know who I am and why I bought this book: I'm a former technical editor and writer. As a girl, I was discouraged from studying math, because at the time (the Fifties and Sixties) they thought girls couldn't understand it.

Recently I've tried to fill in the gaps in my math and science education. I thought the idea of Hawkings choosing landmark math texts and commenting on them was fantastic. After spending three days trying to understand the Euclidian proof of the Pythagorean theorem, and concluding I was just too dumb, I turned the page and discovered that according to the commentary the proof was for an isosceles right triangle, while the illustration was not isosceles.

Other reviewers have commented on the egregious errors and typos. I'd like to add that the whole publication is a typographical horror. The publisher should be ashamed. The font size is miniscule. The illustrations are often misleading. Hawkings may have chosen the texts, but the publisher apparently selected the editions based not on quality of translation but whether the copyright had expired: most appear to be nineteenth-century and to include outdated commentaries. At first I thought the commentaries were by Hawkings, but they aren't, and this was not only a disappointment but also a source of my confusion at several points where I couldn't understand them.

I would be surprised if even ten percent of the book is authored by Hawkings. Given this, the ghastly page layout, inaccurate reprints of outdated texts, and amateurish copyediting, this book is overpriced.

IF YOU'RE MATHEMATICALLY LITERATE, you will likely find Hawkings' material a joy to read. Even I -- with my limited background -- am able to appreciate some of it. But the minute after I want to shout for joy when I understand something beautiful in the book, I want to throw it across the room for something like spelling Leonardo da Vinci "Lionardo" or typos like "Archimedes's asked." With glaringly obvious typos like those, I can only assume there are less obvious typos where it really counts, in the math. It's not that I think typos out-weigh the value of Hawkings' insights, by any means. It's that mathematicians have to be precise in their formulas and proofs if they want to convince anyone they're right. God is also in the details.

Addendum: The more I read, the more disappointed I am in this book. I'm beginning to question whether Hawkings wrote even the introductions to the excerpts. Many of them are nothing but poorly written biographies of the mathematicians anthologized. The intro to Newton asserts that Newton falsely claimed priority over Leibniz for devising calculus, for example, but the book doesn't include anything written by Leibniz. The book excerpts Euler, but only mentions the constant e in one sentence in the Euler intro. I'm going to look for a good history of mathematics and give up on this volume. And when I'm ready, I'll look for good translations of the original texts.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: God Created the Integers
Comment: This is a beautiful book because it lists the life and work of 16 mathematicians whose work has inspired our civilization. For example Einstein is not included, but Riemann whose analysis of curved space is the foundation of the General Theory of Relativity is rhere. So also are Archimedes and Newton the pillars of mathematical physics.Kurt Godel in 1931 proved that there will always a truth that is outside a set of axioms.Some of the original papers are difficult but I have gained much from the logic of George Boole which also governs computer programmes.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Forget the flaws. Enjoy it.
Comment: I just couldn't put this book down. I was so absorbed that I even missed my station and had to catch a train back. The biographies mixed with mathematical explanations and an outline of the significance of each work is brilliant. It gives one an insight into how context-dependent genius really is.

I knew that the book had flaws because I read these reviews a while ago. But so what! You wouldn't use this book for reference or as a text book. It's meant to be entertainment and entertaining it is. If you can understand the maths and the significance of the selected papers you can enjoy it without worrying too much about everything being crossed and dotted.

I knew the biographies of many, but not all, of these men. Of the ones I didn't know, my favorite is George Boole. The description of his unusual career and the amazingly clear and readable paper on symbolic logic are worth buying the book for. I almost choked up when I read how he died.

Anyway, in our age or irrationality and ignorance we need more books like this to show us that we can rise above it all.

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