reading now · mathematics
The Search for Certainty
Marcus Giaquinto
An excellent book for those who really want to understand the foundations of mathematics—not just how mathematics works, but how we know that it works. Giaquinto digs into some of its most elemental constructs and asks deceptively simple questions: What exactly are numbers? How do we know mathematical truths? Where does certainty in mathematics actually come from?
It’s the kind of book that takes things you were taught to simply accept and asks you to look underneath them.
Notes 1
In my now defunct (and hacked 😭) blog from yester-years (a wordpress blog, that had a rogue plugin that .. well whatever, it’s gone), I had written about the idea of infinity. I came up with a gut intuitive idea of having a ‘unit infinity’ (the ‘smallest’ infinity) and then having multiple other infinities that can be measured .. the ‘bigger infinities’. Anyway, only later when I began reading this book, did I realize, Cantor came up with a better way to think of it.