An ambitious but overly abbreviated assemblage of arguments.
A collection of short proofs tackling fundamental problems and paradoxes in mathematics.
Connor bombastically makes it clear that his quarry is the truth, however iconoclastic it might be, and that he has no reverence for the intellectual idols of academic mathematics: “Truth is an outrage; it does not defer to authority.” In that spirit, he challenges some fundamental conventions in modern math: He rejects imaginary numbers and provides what he claims is a disproof of Euler’s famous formula (and uses it to recalculate the speed of light), completes Fermat’s theorem, resolves Cantor’s paradox, and demonstrates the irrationality of pi—all in fewer than 50 pages of terse language and symbol-laden formulae. Obviously, this is a book that’s singularly intended for the mathematically sophisticated. There’s no overriding theme to the essays beyond the author’s ambition, which one can’t help but find impressive. Also, Connor’s command of the subject matter, including the pertinent scholarly literature, is beyond reproach. However, his arguments and proofs are developed so rapidly, and with so little explanation and commentary, that even the most mathematically astute readers will find them hard to parse and not entirely convincing. For example, in a discussion of Cantor’s paradox, the author contends that the notion of a set of all sets is logically impermissible. Not only is this position less than persuasive, given the brevity of its exposition, but he omits any treatment of the paradox’s extraordinary stakes, which, for Cantor, involved humanity’s basic (and errant) intuitions about infinity. Similarly, the author’s jarringly abridged treatment of Euler’s formula—about a page and a half of discussion—glosses over its centrality to complex number theory and trigonometry. In another chapter, Connor provides a solution to a problem that “bedeviled” the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in his youth, regarding the nature of propositions, but he neither provides a definition of propositions nor discusses why Russell considered it to be such an important problem. Overall, each section reads like an outline for a longer essay that’s yet to be completed.
An ambitious but overly abbreviated assemblage of arguments.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-2617-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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