Donal O'Shea
Auteur de The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe
A propos de l'auteur
Donal O'Shea is the Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Mathematics and the dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts
Crédit image: Autore Maurizio Codogno Descrizione Donal O'Shea in occasione del Premio Peano 200 Data 20 novembre 2008 http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DonalOShea-2008.jpg
Œuvres de Donal O'Shea
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 3
- Membres
- 602
- Popularité
- #41,741
- Évaluation
- 3.8
- Critiques
- 12
- ISBN
- 37
- Langues
- 8
Firstly, the book introduces many concepts by name, with some short descriptions, and then goes on to discuss them in some qualitative detail; how one concept leads to another; how concepts fail to connect. For me, at least, this was difficult to follow. Granted, in order to truly understand what is being discussed, you would need to understand the mathematics; perhaps this is just an insurmountable problem in trying to translate high-level and difficult mathematics into lay-language.
Secondly, there are too many sections where names and dates and attempted proofs of such-and-such a conjecture/theory/etc. are listed; in these sections it very much feels like the only people who would be able to pull much meaning would be already quite familiar with the topics. There is much more of this in the last third or quarter of the book.
The middle 85% of the book isn't about the Poincare Conjecture per se. In this, I would describe the book as the history of mathematicians and mathematics, from ancient times to today, as told from the point of view of the Poincare Conjecture. An analogy might be something like a book that details the life of some famous figure by telling the history of their family/ancestry and the times and events their family lived through.… (plus d'informations)