Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable by Brian Clegg.

2/5 rating. 243 pages.

Book #2 of 2023. Read January 16, 2023.

This book was an absolute slog to get through. Brian took an incredibly complex topic and did not make it any easier to understand.

I literally teach math and theoretically would be in the audience of people most likely to understand what was being discussed in this book. Instead, Brian used a whole bunch of hard-to-grasp examples from mathematical history and tried to explain them in words without many visuals. He did offer some history on the views of infinity over time, but even here, I felt like it was a whole bunch of random facts about people in history. There was next to no throughline, story-arc or anything else.

Apart from this, he uses a lot of jargon for seemingly no reason, which just makes the topic seem more impossible to grasp. What made me laugh is I wrote a note that he was doing this, then he ironically wrote in the next chapter that some people use jargon for no reason and it “can be just as confusing as if it were intended to conceal”. Hmmmm, sounds somewhat familiar…

The book just seemed like a winding, somewhat nonsensical meandering through religion and vague history on infinity.

The only really interesting thing I got from this book is that Cartesian coordinates were named after Rene Descartes. Now that I actually thought was a fun fact.

Don’t read this book, it’s a waste of your time.

Quotes:

“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” – Karl Popper

“The bishop may well have got round to putting his doubts about fluxions into print anyway, but it is thanks to Halley’s input that his work on the subject comes across so strongly, and has the unequivocal and rather magnificent title The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician.”

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” – Attributed to Einstein

#math #books #dontreadthis #bookreview #thankfullyitsover

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