The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men
eBook - ePub

The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men

A Cultural History

  1. 240 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men

A Cultural History

About this book

A masterful cultural history of mathematics from bestselling Italian mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini. Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Have we invented numbers or do they truly exist? What sort of reality should we attribute to them? Mathematics has always been a way of understanding and ordering the world: from sacred ancient texts and pre-Socratic philosophers to twentieth-century logicians such as Russell and Frege and beyond. In this masterful, elegant book, mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, from ancient Greece to India to our contemporary obsession with algorithms, showing how mathematical thinking is inextricably linked with philosophical, existential and religious questions—and indeed with our cosmic understanding of the world.

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Yes, you can access The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men by Paolo Zellini in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Mathematics & History & Philosophy of Mathematics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Introduction
  4. 1. Abstraction, Existence and Reality
  5. 2. Mathematics of the Gods
  6. 3. Mathematical and Philosophical Formulas
  7. 4. Growth and Decrease, Number and Nature
  8. 5. Katà gnómonos phýsin  : The Nature of the Gnomon
  9. 6. Dýnamis: The Capacity to Produce
  10. 7. Intermission: Spiritual Mechanics
  11. 8. Zeno’s Paradoxes: The Explanation of Movement
  12. 9. The Paradoxes of Plurality
  13. 10. The Limited and the Limitless: Incommensurability and Algorithms
  14. 11. The Reality of Numbers: Cantor’s Fundamental Sequences
  15. 12. The Reality of Numbers: Dedekind’s Sections
  16. 13. Mathematics: A Discovery or an Invention?
  17. 14. From the Continuum to the Digital
  18. 15. The Growth of Numbers
  19. 16. The Growth of Matrices
  20. 17. The Crisis of Fundamentals and the Growth of Complexity: Reality and Efficiency
  21. 18. Verum et Factum
  22. 19. Recursion and Invariability
  23. About the Author
  24. Notes
  25. Index
  26. Copyright