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Chargement... The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinitypar Amir D. Aczel
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. I abandoned this book at least a decade ago, after reading only one chapter. It's a topic that I'm extremely interested in, but I just don't have a use for a book on this topic that's almost entirely without references. Flipping through the first chapter now in an attempt to remember why I found it so disappointing, this sentence stood out: "A great tribute to the Pythagoreans' intellectual achievements is the fact that they deduced the special place of the number 10 from an abstract mathematical argument rather than from counting the fingers on two hands." This seems pretty speculative; I can't help wondering whether the justification might have come *after* the idea that ten was special. Inutile fare giri di parole: non mi ha affatto convinto la tesi di Amir Aczel, che in questo suo libro mette insieme misticismo e matematica, e soprattutto decide che chi si occupa troppo degli infiniti impazzisce: non solo Cantor, ma anche Gödel (che dell'ipotesi del continuo si è occupato solo per una piccola parte della sua produzione), e finanche Post e Zermelo, per non parlare di Galileo. (Paul Cohen però no. Chissa perché). Non metto becco sulla parte legata al misticismo; la parte matematica moderna è comunque ben trattata, pur se Gianluigi Olivieri non conosce bene la terminologia matematica italiana parlando di insiemi contabili anziché numerabili e dell'assioma "di" (e non "della") scelta; ma su quella antica c'è da mettersi le mani nei capelli, con Archimede che avrebbe calcolato il volume di un cono inscritto in una sfera mentre in realtà era una sfera inscritta in un cilindro (e no, questo non è un errore di traduzione, è così anche nell'originale). Sul fronte positivo, il libro può essere utile a chi si è fermato ai paradossi "facili" sull'infinito, come l'albergo di Hilbert, e vuole avere un'idea di cosa sia l'ipotesi del continuo e come la comunità matematica è riuscita a gestire la sua (non-)dimostrazione. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
"In the late 19th century, a brilliant mathematician languished in an asylum. His greatest accomplishment, the result of a series of leaps of insight, was his pioneering understanding of the nature of infinity. This is the story of Georg Cantor: how he came to his theories and the reverberations of his work, the consequences of which shape our world." "Cantor's theory of the infinite is famous for its many seeming contradictions: for example, we can prove there are as many points on a line one inch long as on a line one mile long; we can also prove that in all time there are as many years as there are days. According to Cantor, infinite sets are equal."
"The mind-twisting, deeply philosophical work of Cantor has its roots in ancient Greek mathematics and Jewish numerology as found in the mystical work known as the Kabbalah. Cantor used the term aleph - the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with all its attendant divine associations - to refer to the mysterious number which is the sum of positive integers. It is not the last positive number, because ... there is no last. It is the ultimate number that is always being approached: just as, for example, there is no last fraction before the number 1"--Jacket. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)511.3Natural sciences and mathematics Mathematics General Principles Mathematical (Symbolic) logicClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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