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Men of Mathematics Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book on review of mathematics
Comment: Its a very good book on review of mathematics. It deals with evolution of mathematics as a whole. It is definitely not for general public.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: No Harm No Foul
Comment: From page 86 of the Touchstone edition: "The PENSEES and the PROVICINCIAL LETTERS, apart from their literary excellences, appeal principally to a type of mind that is rapidly becoming extinct." Even though I am here reading that my mind is rapidly becoming extinct, I still got a huge kick out of Bell's literary caricature of Pascal. Bell treats Pascal and his proponents with a kind of highlander tough love: giving us a dose of what bootcamp with kilts is probably like. lol. So anyway, I don't find Bell's writing in his literary portrait of Pascal at all anti-Christian. On the contrary, I find Bell a breath of fresh air. He obviously far more than means well. For he provides a more or less impartial commentary on Pascal in his curmudgeonly, jocular, celtic way.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Men of Mathematics
Comment: My family has produced several mathematicians, but I am not one of them. However, this book is extremely interesting- just do as I did and skim right over the math.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A little too bigoted...
Comment: Apart from the glaring historical inaccuracies (mathematically speaking) with which E. T. Bell embellished his book, I must say that I found the pervasive anti-Christian sarcasm to be very offensive and tiresome. E. T. Bell seems to reserve a special disliking for Blaise Pascal and Augustin-Louis Cauchy... Pascal is made out to be a mentally ill religious lunatic and Cauchy to be an eccentric and bigoted religious fanatic. Bell sacrifices truth on the altar of propaganda especially in the section on Evariste Galois - here he takes particular pains to portay the great mathematician Cauchy to be a fool and a religious bigot while Galois (a very unstable, self-destructive character if there ever was one) is made out to be the martyred hero!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Big on inspiration (for boys), short on facts
Comment: Bell's book has been an inspiration to several generations of mathematicians, encouraging them to pursue the creative discipline of mathematics. For that, he has done a great service to mathematics.

Unfortunately, that is the only good thing I can say about this book. E.T. Bell was a respected Caltech mathematician, who dabbled in writing books about mathematical history. He was a great writer with style, which has led many to believe he was also an eminent scholar of history of mathematics. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bell manages to perpetrate fiction in almost every other line, mangling known facts, making unwarranted judgments and characterizations of personalities and motives. Whatever he needs to do to construct an entertaining story, he does. His name is universally cursed by historians of mathematicians.

Making up stuff for a good story might not ordinarily be bad. After all, a lot of people do it, and certainly encouraging youngsters to study mathematics is not a bad goal. But there are several ways in which this book is insidious. One is the negative potrayal of women mathematicians. As the astute reader will have noted, the title is *Men* of Mathematics. (On my paperpack edition, the word "men" is even set off by a different color than the rest of the title!) The forgiving reader may be willing to forgive this; after all, the book was written in less politically correct times, and certainly most of the famous and well-documented mathematicians are men. Gauss? A man. Euler? A man also. Etc. On the other hand, there are notable examples of great mathematicians who happened to be women. Emmy Noether and Sonja Kowalewski, for example. Women who are mentioned in Bell's book, but are either paid little attention to or treated rather badly, in a way that clearly highlights Bell's own prejudices. Some readers will be struck by sentences like "Sonja's sex had got the better of her ambitions and she had been living happily with her husband." Rather than list more examples, let me stop by adding that this kind of sentence is typical of Bell, and doesn't stand out much. What is perhaps the most revealing is that Chapter 22, "Master and Pupil", which is about Weierstrass and Kowalewski, spends undue amount of time discussing Kowalewski's sexual attributes and their effect on her mathematical colleagues and teachers, and little explaining her contributions to mathematics.

Bell also shows prejudice when he explains that the dispute between Cantor and Kronecker was due, in part, because:

"Rightly or wrongly, Cantor blamed Kronecker for his failure to obtain the coveted position at Berlin. The aggressive clannishness of Jews has often been remarked, sometimes as an argument against employing them in academic work, but it has not been so generally observed that there is no more vicious academic hatred than that of one Jew for another when they disagree on purely scientific matters or when one is jealous or afraid of another. Gentiles either laugh these hatreds off or go at them in an efficient, underhand way which often enables them to accomplish their spiteful ends under the guise of sincere friendship. When two intellectual Jews fall out they disagree all over, throw reserve to the dogs, and do everything in their power to cut one anothers' throats or stab one another in the back."

This quote was later modified (I think it might have been after Bell's death) to be about styles of academic infighting, rather than a commentary about Jews and Gentiles.

Bell typically exaggerates or just plain makes things up in order to make for a better story, but I think such a false potrayal of mathematicians cannot be good. The chapter on Galois, the most famous part of the book, is replete with historical errors and omissions, including rearranging order of events, leaving out the less savory aspects of Galois' personality, and basically saying Galois invented Galois theory the night before the duel, even though parts of his work were published and known by that time to other mathematicians.

Bell consistently paints Galois as misunderstood and his older mathematical colleagues as buffoons. This is a seductive thought to some, but the reality is that great mathematical ideas don't have to be suppressed in order to be dormant. Truly great ideas can sometimes take years to sink in. Not a romantic viewpoint perhaps, but I think Galois' greatness is enhanced, not diminished, by this realization. (Of course, Galois's inability/unwillingness to better communicate his ideas didn't help!)

This book is certainly inspirational for some, but especially for today's audience, I think it'll be glaringly biased and I doubt very inspiring for young girls in particular. The worst thing you can do is give this book to your child to read. There have been many books since then that are more accurate and less prejudiced in flavor.

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