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Circularity: A Common Secret To Paradoxes, Scientific Revolutions And Humor
"The book is divided into 8-10 chapters that are each only 2 or 3 pages long . . . this feels like a nice feature of the book, since you can dip in and just read a short bite before moving on. The author clearly has some interesting ideas and at times I found his writing to be quite engaging." Maa Review "I did enjoy reading (and re-reading) this book very much. Reading it deserves a warm recommendation not only for mathematicians but for anybody . . . this book makes you think about how and what you think you are thinking." European Mathematical Society "Circularity" is the story of a Janus-faced conceptual structure, that on the one hand led to deep scientific discoveries, and on the other hand is used to trick the mind into believing the impossible. Alongside mathematical revolutions that eventually led to the invention of the computer, the book describes ancient paradoxes that arise from circular thinking. Another aspect of circularity, its ability to entertain, leads to a surprising insight on the time old question "What is humor". The book presents the ubiquity of circularity in many fields, and its power to confuse and to instruct.
180 pages, Paperback
Published April 21, 2016
31 people want to read
About the author
Ron Aharoni
15 books3 followersRon Aharoni (Hebrew: רון אהרוני ) is an Israeli mathematician, working in finite and infinite combinatorics. Aharoni is a professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1979. With Nash-Williams and Shelah he generalized the marriage theorem by obtaining the right transfinite conditions for infinite bipartite graphs. He subsequently proved the appropriate versions of the König theorem and the Menger theorem for infinite graphs (the latter with Eli Berger).
Aharoni is the author of several nonspecialist books; the most successful is Arithmetic for Parents, a book helping parents and elementary school teachers in teaching basic mathematics. He also wrote a book on the connections between Mathematics, poetry and beauty and a recent one on philosophy (The Cat That is not There, both in Hebrew). His last to date book is "Man detaches meaning", on a mechanism common to jokes and poetry.
Aharoni is the author of several nonspecialist books; the most successful is Arithmetic for Parents, a book helping parents and elementary school teachers in teaching basic mathematics. He also wrote a book on the connections between Mathematics, poetry and beauty and a recent one on philosophy (The Cat That is not There, both in Hebrew). His last to date book is "Man detaches meaning", on a mechanism common to jokes and poetry.
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