Volume 46, Number 18 · November 18, 1999
The Way to Numerical Heaven
By John Allen Paulos
The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Metropolitan, 262 pp., $22.00
Since the days of Pythagoras, numbers have appealed to our sense of the mystical and spooky as well as to our rational and analytic faculties. Whether they are constructs or inventions, facets of an idealized reality, or just rule-governed symbols and squiggles are issues that have resounded all through the history of philosophy. Whatever one's philosophy of mathematics, however, there is something ethereal about numbers. They do seem, at least in uncritical moments, to reside in some sort of Platonic heaven. Numbers are up there somewhere.
Review, 3076 words
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