Matthew Daniels's Reviews > The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity
The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity
by Amir D. Aczel
by Amir D. Aczel
Matthew Daniels's review
Feb 07, 11
Recommended for:
Casual readers interested in history about the infinite
Read from January 28 to February 04, 2011 — I own a copy, read count: 1
This book was a captivating read... but not exactly what I was looking for when I read it. Though flavorful -- and I can appreciate that this is book is written for a specific audience that I might not be a part of -- I felt that Aczel could have dared to present a little more mathematics in a few places. There were about two or three pages devoted to silhouetting Cantor's diagonal proofs for the countability of the integers and reals, but besides occasionally inserting a statement of the continuum hypothesis he shied away from presenting anything much deeper than a layman's explanation of some very important mathematics.
I'm glad I read this book, and I still would have if I'd known more about the content ahead of time. It was well-composed and gave me lots of interesting trivia and historical context. Just know that if you're looking for something that tells you much more about infinity in the mathematical sense than the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page, you'll want to find a different book.
I'm glad I read this book, and I still would have if I'd known more about the content ahead of time. It was well-composed and gave me lots of interesting trivia and historical context. Just know that if you're looking for something that tells you much more about infinity in the mathematical sense than the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page, you'll want to find a different book.
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