A fascinating topic, despite the author’s sometimes plodding approach.
The greatest mathematician of the 20th century was actually a committee.
Science popularizer Aczel (Chance, 2004, etc.) begins with a mystery: the voluntary disappearance in 1991 of Alexandre Grothendieck, a leading French mathematician. The author surveys Grothendieck’s childhood in a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied France, then shifts to the careers of several other French mathematicians active before WWII. The common thread in their lives is Nicolas Bourbaki, a fictional mathematician under whose name the most influential work of the modern era was published. Bourbaki was, in reality, a group that first met in December 1934 in Paris, believing that math needed to be rebuilt from its foundations, starting with the fundamentals of set theory. Although there were always acknowledged leaders, beginning with André Weil, decisions were made collectively. Bourbaki’s members shouted each other down and argued vehemently over every detail of the work in progress. Miraculously, this chaotic methodology produced brilliant results. Bourbaki’s insistence on rigor and its emphasis on structure revolutionized the way math was taught. The “new math” that swept through schools in the 1960s was a Bourbaki creation. Likewise, as Aczel points out at length, the “structural” movement in philosophy, science and the arts derives from the Bourbaki approach, especially as adopted by Claude Lévi-Strauss, to whom Weil taught the mathematics that would underpin his anthropological studies. For four decades, the best young French—and, increasingly, foreign—mathematicians were recruited into the group, and its influence was unmatched. Grothendieck, most brilliant of the latter-day members, eventually took math beyond the reach of set theory, at which point he left Bourbaki, and the group began its decline. But as Aczel shows, it had left an indelible stamp on mathematics and on the world at large.
A fascinating topic, despite the author’s sometimes plodding approach.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-931-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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