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outcolder's review against another edition
2.0
Berlinksi gets tingles up and down his spine when an elegant proof reaches a surprising conclusion, but what really turns him on is smart men losing intellectual pissing contests to even smarter men. It is possible that his own excitement and passion might inspire readers to study math, but that his not his intention. In addition to crowing about his own ability to follow others' mental gymnastics, he manages to fire off a great deal of misanthropy and to generally reinforce the wall of misogyny that has kept women out of this field and out of his history of it.
As someone else already said in another review, if you are already familiar with the math he is talking about you'll find the history a little thin and if you are not familiar with the math, you probably won't be able to follow his explanations of it. Berlinski takes mathematical proofs and concepts as starting off points for metaphors and brief but detailed images so that Gödel's theorem becomes a story about pony-tailed film editors and long-legged Bryn Mawr film studies graduates. Not amusing and not helpful, there are more spine-tingling moments in your average geometry textbook.
As someone else already said in another review, if you are already familiar with the math he is talking about you'll find the history a little thin and if you are not familiar with the math, you probably won't be able to follow his explanations of it. Berlinski takes mathematical proofs and concepts as starting off points for metaphors and brief but detailed images so that Gödel's theorem becomes a story about pony-tailed film editors and long-legged Bryn Mawr film studies graduates. Not amusing and not helpful, there are more spine-tingling moments in your average geometry textbook.
swashbuckling_mathematician's review against another edition
4.0
The author is an arrogant ass. If you can get past that, it's an entertaining and unique retelling of the history of mathematics.
cacia's review against another edition
3.0
I looked forward to reading this book and anticipated liking it; I have always liked math and numbers, and to learn the history of mathematical findings and the context in which discoveries were made seemed to me an engrossing prospect. In this book I was hoping to find a narrative that would reinvigorate my passion for numbers just as [b:The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science|24861842|The Food Lab Better Home Cooking Through Science|J. Kenji López-Alt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1430990153l/24861842._SX50_.jpg|44509454] inflamed my love of kitchen chemistry and [b:A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation|8873736|A Dash of Style The Art and Mastery of Punctuation|Noah Lukeman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355826412l/8873736._SX50_.jpg|2958581] reinforced and intensified my zeal for punctuation, but I would have settled for merely a straightforward history.
Unfortunately, Berlinski is a little too enamored of using abstruse phrasings and metaphors to describe or illustrate the historical anecdotes and mathematical concepts he surveys in this book. Chapter after chapter, I had the impression that he was infatuated with his own grandiloquent ways of saying things, and I was left reading over a sentence or a paragraph again, wondering if there wasn't a clearer and simpler way of conveying the same point.
Did I learn something, despite all that? Yes, I know more about the history of mathematics now, and that was my purpose for reading the book, so I do not regret spending my time on it. But did I like the book? Ehh... I desired to like it, but no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. Perhaps I would have appreciated Berlinski's rambles more if I were conversant in higher mathematics, because I had no trouble grasping the algebraic concepts (even though incompleteness and non-Euclidean geometry got crazy), but even so, his style vexed me and I kept feeling that he was bloviating on a hobbyhorse rather than lucidly laying out a history.
2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 because I did learn something.
Unfortunately, Berlinski is a little too enamored of using abstruse phrasings and metaphors to describe or illustrate the historical anecdotes and mathematical concepts he surveys in this book. Chapter after chapter, I had the impression that he was infatuated with his own grandiloquent ways of saying things, and I was left reading over a sentence or a paragraph again, wondering if there wasn't a clearer and simpler way of conveying the same point.
Did I learn something, despite all that? Yes, I know more about the history of mathematics now, and that was my purpose for reading the book, so I do not regret spending my time on it. But did I like the book? Ehh... I desired to like it, but no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. Perhaps I would have appreciated Berlinski's rambles more if I were conversant in higher mathematics, because I had no trouble grasping the algebraic concepts (even though incompleteness and non-Euclidean geometry got crazy), but even so, his style vexed me and I kept feeling that he was bloviating on a hobbyhorse rather than lucidly laying out a history.
2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 because I did learn something.
bakudreamer's review against another edition
1.0
Only read half of this. This guys is sort of nuts ( has a PhD in math, but, doesn't think evoluton is real ) Writes like English is his second language. Turns out, that Binot Mandelbrot, the French mathematician, fractals guy, is his cousin.
shimizee's review against another edition
2.0
Great content about selected topics in the history of mathematics, although I found some chapters barely readable
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