Journey to the Edge of Reason - Stephen Budiansky ***

Compared with the sciences, mathematics can seem relatively short on interesting characters. There's no doubt that the subject of Stephen Budiansky's biography - Kurt Gödel was an engaging subject, from his effective shattering of the certainties of the mathematical system to his increasing oddity in his later life, but perhaps surprisingly this claims to be the first significant biography of Gödel.

Budiansky gives us plenty on the context of Gödel's work and life - and a brief exploration of Gödel's incompleteness theorems (though their nature means that it's hard to give more than a faint impression of how they do what they do). Unfortunately, though, this is not a particularly accessible biography.

With many scientific/mathematical biographies, poor accessibility can be down to a lack of context, with too much focus on the detailed complexities of the science or the maths. Here, though, the issue is the reverse. There is far too much context, so much so that Gödel often gets lost amongst all the detail. After a few introductory pages giving a flash forward to Gödel's death, the first real chapter illustrates this all too well - there is so much material focussing on Austria as it was when Gödel was born that we don’t meet the young Gödel until page 41.

Similarly, later on, the book can feel more like a biography of, say, the disputed genius (or oddball) philosopher Wittgenstein as it is of Gödel. I don't know if it's just that there isn't too much biographical detail on Gödel himself (which would explain why it has taken so long to get a biography), or if Budiansky simply enjoys going off on tangents, but I found it hard not to keep skipping forward to find the next mention of the purported subject of the book.

A bit of a frustrating experience, then. There is no doubt that there is plenty of interesting material here, but far too much history, philosophical context and detail on obscure academics that Gödel interacted with, and not enough on the man himself.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

Search This Blog