EAN: 9780141986487

THE MATHEMATICS OF THE GODS AND THE ALGORITHMS ...

Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Do numbers truly exist? What sort of reality do
formulas describe?The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can
seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present  it is
supposed  and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind  mysterious tools for
those unengaged with the world. Yet  from its most remote history and deepest purpose 
mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order  but also as a foundation for
the reality it describes.In this elegant book  mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini
offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics  ranging widely from the
paradoxes of ancient Greece to the sacred altars of India  from Mesopotamian calculus to our
own contemporary obsession with algorithms.Masterful and illuminating  The Mathematics of the
Gods and the Algorithms of Men transforms our understanding of mathematical thinking  showing
that it is inextricably linked with the philosophical and the religious as well as the mundane
- and  indeed  with our own very human experience of the universe.

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