Volume 34, Number 19 · December 3, 1987
Count Up
By Martin Gardner
To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite
by Eli Maor
Birkhäuser, 275 pp., $49.50
Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality
by Rudy Rucker
Houghton Mifflin, 328 pp., $17.95
In the above quotation, the first paragraph of Rudy Rucker's latest book, observe the word 'pure.' Mathematical patterns are pure, timeless concepts, uncontaminated by reality. Yet the outside world is so structured that these patterns in the mind apply to it with eerie accuracy. Nothing has more radically altered human history than this uncanny, to some inexplicable, interplay of pure math and the structure of whatever is 'out there.' The interplay is responsible for all science and technology.
Review, 3493 words
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