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Will

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Will is currently reading

Land Title Origins: A Tale of Force and Fraud

by Alfred Noblit Chandler

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(page 2 of 550)
— Jan 16, 2013 09:38PM

Dec 14, 2014 12:35PM

Will is currently reading

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History

by Stephen W. Hawking

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Will said: " Tried to read this and threw in the towel. It's primarily a collection of the crucial mathematical writings from Euclid on. These old texts just aren't that readable.

Hawking's introductions are very interesting, and made me want to learn more about Tried to read this and threw in the towel. It's primarily a collection of the crucial mathematical writings from Euclid on. These old texts just aren't that readable.

Hawking's introductions are very interesting, and made me want to learn more about the history of math. But they're too rapid. Dim-witted readers of my ilk need to be coaxed through this stuff.

The stuff on the progression of ancient Greek mathematics is fascinating. The Pythagoreans had a philosophy wherein numbers, and relations between them, underlay all real phenomena. This theory yielded splendid results early on, with the surprising 3-4-5/Pythagorean-theorem thing being their most spectacular success. They let it go to their heads. Their theory fell apart because they couldn't find a way to express the square root of 2 in real numbers. The Babylonians had some tricks to come close: mainly, they had figured out that 7/5 was really, really close. Try it and see for yourself: 49/25 is so close 2 that it hurts! But the Pythagoreans needed to do better than that, because they had made these strong, absolute claims about reality being made up of ratios between real numbers. Attempts to derive a real solution led to contradictions, because the premise was flawed: the square root of 2 just isn't a real number. Euclid's work was an attempt to start anew after this failure.

There is also an interesting aside about Euclid. Hawking notes that the assumptions of Euclidian space -- straight, infinite lines that take up no space, and the like -- were treated for hundreds of years as literally true in the Aristotelian physics of the west. However, Euclid and the Greeks never imagined that they were literally true, because they had a cosmology where everything in the universe was spherical and contained. The post-Einstein understanding of space as curved and the universe as limited just happens to accord with the Greeks' view.

I caught tons of copy-editing errors in the short part I read. Stephen Hawking, I will copy-edit this for you! It's gonna cost, though.

This is an interesting subject and if there exists a more accessible work than this, I would love to read it. Does anybody have a recommendation? ...more "

May 27, 2012 09:09PM · see review

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Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

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Will said: " I'm still plugging away at this massive tome, but want to record a few thoughts while they are fresh.

First, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. Chernow has managed to persuasively trace over forty anonymously published essays back to Hamilton I'm still plugging away at this massive tome, but want to record a few thoughts while they are fresh.

First, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. Chernow has managed to persuasively trace over forty anonymously published essays back to Hamilton, and also to establish his authorship of a number of George Washington's speeches. This is quite a feat, given the prominence of the subject and the amount of time historians have had to turn these things up. So he deserves props for that.

The book is effective in presenting Hamilton as the most underappreciated founder. It shows that Hamilton's influence was behind the strategy of using guerilla warfare to wear down the British, which Washington used to win the war. It shows that Hamilton's savvy policy laid the basis for the United States's system of finance through the nineteenth century. It also manages to humanize Hamilton, who emerges as a very public spirited man but also surprisingly thin-skinned. I do not think I would have liked the man had I known him, but it is impossible after reading this not to have a certain affection for him.

However, Chernow has a tendency to overdo it in his prose. There is a great deal here that could have been trimmed. In particular, Chernow has a tendency to explain and to editorialize when it would have been more effective simply to demonstrate. There are dozens of redundant passages in which he says things like, "Once again, this shows us that Hamilton was much more sensitive than he let on in public" and, "How impressive that a man so young should have such a firm understanding of public finance!" For my part, I find this running commentary to detract from the quality of the narrative; I'd prefer to draw my own conclusions.

This is a symptom of another slight defect, which is that Chernow's admiration for Hamilton seems sometimes to get the better of his devotion to the truth. Chernow clearly sees himself as writing to redeem Hamilton from two centuries of Jefferson-inspired propaganda that portrayed him as a monarchist, a would-be tyrant, a philanderer &c. This defense is certainly merited: Hamilton's abolitionism and vision of a robust, mixed economy holds up much better than Jefferson's vision of an agrarian paradise based on liberty and slaveholding. However, I think Chernow goes too far. He seems to want to present the strongest possible case for Hamilton, who for all his virtues was also a megalomaniac with terrible political judgment. Advocacy is properly the realm of the lawyer, not of the historian.

Anyhow, my takeaway is that this massive scholarly work properly ought to be the basis for a more accessible, popular treatment. Movie, PBS series... something. There's a lot of good material here, and Americans have a rather unbecoming taste for hero-worship. ...more "

May 27, 2012 08:43PM · see review

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