Skip to main content

A Certain Ambiguity (SF) – Gaurav Suri & Hartosh Singh Bal ***(**)

This is one of the very few books we have been unable to give a straightforward star rating. The reason is that it has been important to separate the idea and the execution. More on this later.
A Certain Ambiguity is a novel, but a novel with the explicit intention of putting across information about mathematics. This might seem a very new thing to do, but in fact has plenty of historical precedent. For example, when Galileo wrote his two great books, they were in the form of dialogues between fictional characters. Of course they weren’t novels – the novel form didn’t exist – but they did make use of human discussion to help get across complex points to a more general reader.
In A Certain Ambiguity we meet Ravi Kapoor who travels from India to America to further his education, and finds himself increasingly fascinated by both maths and his grandfather, who was a mathematician and had been in the US himself. The storyline interwines Ravi’s experience at college with a gradual uncovering of the reasons his grandfather was jailed for blasphemy, and how his grandfather discussed issues of maths and philosophy with a judge.
First the good stuff, the reason A Certain Ambiguity gets those bracketed five stars. It is a wonderful idea. Popular science is all about getting the joy and wonder of science across to general readers. This is easier with, say, physics or genetics than with maths, which many might find cold and off-putting. Yet Suri and Bal set out to show the genuine joy of discovery that can be there in mathematics, and how knowing about maths can help us understand how human beings understand everything. This is a truly noble aim. Anything that can be done to make science and maths more approachable is well worth the effort. And there are some very effective moments in this novel where Suri and Bal manage to get across mathematical intuitions in a fashion that’s better than anything I’ve seen elsewhere.
However, and there has to be a “however”, it’s a flawed enterprise. Firstly it just isn’t a very good novel. There’s no real feeling of identity with the protagonists – I don’t really care what happens to them – and there’s much too much fake quotation and concentration on jazz that is simply boring. Then there are one or two factual issues that are a little uncomfortable. We hear a Stanford professor say that Galileo invented the telescope – painfully wrong. A judge in the US finds it shocking to have music in church – unlikely unless he was a Quaker, which other comments he makes seems unlikely. The whole lengthy argument over religion gets in the way of both the plot and the maths. The fictional journal entries are both banal and boring. To have Spinoza say “Today I was excommunicated,” is just too like a school essay attempt at a historical character’s journal.
There’s also too much mathematical exposition – more than I would expect in a straight popular maths book, let alone a novel where it breaks the flow. And in the end, the premise that seems to take everyone by surprise – in effect that the “truth” of mathematical systems can’t necessarily be equated with how the physical world works, but stands as a construct in its own right, certainly shouldn’t be a shock to any scientist, and I would have thought wouldn’t take any of the characters in the book by surprise either.
I can’t, in all sincerity, recommend this book either as a novel or as a way to get an understanding of the maths it contains, but I can and do wholeheartedly celebrate the value of the authors’ attempt.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more