Solid as a straightforward chronology of how mathematics has developed over time, and the author adds a provocative note...
The emphasis is on “real” in the latest by the prolific British science writer, who questions the extent to which mathematics truly reflects the workings of nature.
Clegg (Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future, 2015, etc.) has a degree in physics from Cambridge, and he uses that knowledge to discourse on the relationship between math and science. Math builds its own universe based on given (i.e., not proven) axioms and rules of operation to derive facts (theorems) that are true in that system. Science, on the other hand, builds theories based on observations and experiments, and the theories become conventional wisdom until questioned by new observations and data. Nevertheless, over time, there has been an eerie congruence between abstruse developments in math—e.g., non-Euclidean geometry—and the equations that govern Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Clegg suggests that math increasingly has come to rule the roost in physics. Nobody has ever seen a black hole he notes; the objects are “more the product of mathematics than of science,” the evidence for their existence being indirect. Likewise the Higgs boson and superstring theory. The author urges caution and a step back rather than obedience to a questionable math authority. Before reaching this conclusion, Clegg treats readers to an orderly history of math. He begins with counting on fingers or marks on sticks to match the amount of a physical object, leading to symbols for numbers. These numbers are really real, he says, because they are based on matches with objects in nature. But as math evolved, that connection blurred. By the 19th century, with set theory and concepts of orders of infinity, and 20th-century proofs on the incompleteness of mathematical systems and other logical conundrums, the relation to reality has faded—as will some readers’ attention, because this is not easy stuff.
Solid as a straightforward chronology of how mathematics has developed over time, and the author adds a provocative note urging scientists to keep it in its place.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08104-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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