Customer Reviews

Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason

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These interviews of G. Chaitin provide a good picture of what science is about: just another human activity. It shows how subjectivity is a part of what people call science...The book provides a historical perspective of the work by Hilbert, Godel, Turing,...on maths and its limitations. Mostly computer scientists and mathematicians will be interested in reading this book since it goes all about Godel and Turing's achievements on the limits of formalisms, undecidability and the limits of mathematics in general...without forgetting the work of G. Chaitin in algorithmic information theory and randomness in mathematics that continues the work of these great men.

I know very little about math, and I say that only to make it clear that I don't have the tools that some people have to explain why I loved reading this book, and why I will read it again, or give it as a gift. But I am a reader, and I couldn't put this book down, and I usually feel that way only about novels. So as a reader I will say that this is a beautiful book. It's almost perfect, in a way. (In the same way that I would say Laurie Colwin's book, Happy All The Time, is the perfect modern American novel.) And that's because it's so hard to put down.

Do not buy it. You are wasting you time and money.