The conclusion falls a bit flat, but Livio’s trip through mathematical history is thoroughly enjoyable and requires no...
Why does math describe reality so well? A scientist offers tentative answers.
Livio (The Equation that Couldn’t Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry, 2005, etc.), an astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, frames his investigation with a history of math, beginning with the key question: Are mathematical truths discovered or invented? Pythagoras came down firmly on the side of discovery. His argument convinced Plato, and thus almost every ancient philosopher of note. The default assumption throughout most of history was that numbers, geometric figures and other mathematical truths are real. Galileo was the first to argue that scientific truth was necessarily expressed in mathematical terms. Newton’s highly accurate calculations of the gravitational force drove the point home, implying that math and physical reality were two sides of the same coin. Even probability and statistics, which seem fuzzier than the hard equations of physics, give useful answers in the world of quantum interactions. But then math began to explore realms of thought that had no obvious relation to the world as we experience it: non-Euclidean geometry, or the paradoxes of set theory and symbolic logic. The idea that math was a game invented by mathematicians rather than something inherent in reality became fashionable, perhaps even inescapable. Also, it became clear that certain undeniably useful scientific disciplines—Darwinian evolution, to name one salient example—resisted mathematical treatment. Even so, Livio shows that correspondences between mathematical discoveries and physical phenomena continued to crop up, often in abstract mathematics created without any idea of practical applications, such as Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry. Knot topology, devised to explain a long-discredited model of the atom, turned out to have application to string theory. The author gives no final answer to the central question of math’s relationship to reality. There are physical phenomena that are modeled by math, he asserts, but we also understand reality with a brain wired to find mathematical relations all around it.
The conclusion falls a bit flat, but Livio’s trip through mathematical history is thoroughly enjoyable and requires no special training to follow it.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9405-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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
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