Customer Reviews

Is God a Mathematician?

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The specific question posed in the title doesn't actually get answered (at least not directly by God). In fact, it gets illuminated, and in the most entertaining and probing ways. Dr. Livio weaves together science, history, and philosophy breathing life into some of the most famous thinkers and thinking about mathematics' extraordinary utility in describing our physical world. He explains these sometimes contrary perspectives so clearly and concisely you feel you could almost write a layman's treatise yourself. Were he a teacher at my high school or university he would have been my favorite, leaving me with not only profound understandings but, perhaps moreso, with profound questions.

After his fabulous "The Golden Ratio," Livio now tackles the question of the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in explaining the world. Mixing philosophy, mathematics, and the sciences, he creates an intellectual tension that reads almost like a mystery novel. I liked in particular the chapter on the ideas of Archimedes and Galileo, and the chapter on logic, which was challenging but fascinating.

I had two reactions to the book. The first is a little negative since the book does not answer the question posed in the title, or the real issue the book sets out to investigate: Why is mathematics is so unreasonably effective at describing nature? Mathematics is used to understand and describe everything from radioactive decay, the movements of planets, the way our brain works, the construction of bridges, and countless other phenomenon. But why does it work so well? The other reaction is positive. The book provides an interesting overview of mathematical history over the past 2,000 years. All concepts are explained in everyday language; no mathematical background is required. This is a strong point of the book. The book is whirlwind tour of mathematical history covering the main ideas of the greatest mathematical thinkers, and touching on such subjects as logic, geometry, gravitation, and knots.

Anyone interested in mathematics, philosophy, or science, will love this book.
Even though I always knew that all the fundamental theories of the universe are based on mathematics, it somehow never occurred to me to ask: What is it that makes mathematics so powerful?
Livio explains why the question is even more important than the answer.
What makes this book quite unique is the fact that it is not so much a history of mathematics, as it is a history of ideas on mathematics.

I enjoyed this book but, with all due respect to reviewers who found it deeply insightful on the title topic, I have to agree with Stephen Grey and PBCup. It's a competent and entertaining, superficial account of the relation between mathematics and reality. As a history of mathematics it's equally competent and entertaining, but highly selective. If you want breadth or depth, look elsewhere, and be prepared to sacrifice "entertaining."

This book is better described as a terrific essay about how mathematicians feel about the relation of their work with reality. Judged on this basis, it's up there with the great essays of science. It's book-length because the middle chapters are masterfully-told history vignettes that set the background for the meat of the essay.

Many of the key points are made by direct quotation from great mathematicians and the book spends more time on why people chose problems and how they felt about solutions, than on the pure mathematics. The results of this inquiry are unexpected and fascinating. I think the "God" of the title is not the one who created the universe, as you might expect, but the one in whose image humans were made.

"Is God a Mathematician?" explores whether math was invented or discovered. The author goes through most of the book detailing how math has evolved over the years with each new advancement explaining more and more of nature. Then, he concludes by saying math is partly invented and partly discovered, using the "Microsoft Windows Effect" to explain that just as the brain evolved to deal with the physical world, it developed a language, math, suited to it. The "Windows Effect," because there could have been some other operating system to have dominated, just that Windows was the first to do it.

I suppose one could argue that just as math has evolved to explain more of nature, it could still evolve more and more, explaining more and more of nature. And, even if it never explains everything, it could still get closer and closer and since nature is infinite that math would never explain all of it, and that doesn't matter since God, or whatever force there is above all, could still be a mathematician. Anyway, even though this book may not resolve things, the author does give a pretty good analysis and leaves a reader better able to contemplate the question posed by the author. The author covers things like:

1. Descartes was the principal architect of describing nature in terms of math rather than by the senses. He merged geometry and algebra with his Cartesian coordinate system.

2. Pythagoras found irrational numbers.

3. Plato thought God geometrizes.

4. Archimedes - author says is the greatest mathematician. Perceived math as a language of the universe. Other two greatest: Newton and Gauss.

5. Galileo essentially said math is the grammar of science. Because he basically was saying that human could understand God through math that is why he was brought to trial for heresy.

6. Newton took Descartes' math to explain the cosmos - gravity. Newton and Descartes were religious. To Newton, God was a mathematician.

7. Newton, with calculus, could measure change finely.

8. Bernouli brought in probability to explain things which couldn't be exactly measured. Gauss brought in both probability and statistics to go beyond the physical sciences. Normal distributions, standard deviations and correlation coefficients.

9. Also, non-Euclidean geometry went further in explaining the universe.

10. Bertrand Russell - math can also be reduced to logic - to understand thought, reasoning.

11. Then, Boolean algebra. Also, knot theory lead to understanding DNA, its double helix, then also string theory.

12. Einstein - general and special relativity - warps in time and space.

Again, the author goes through showing how our understanding of the universe has increased along with new discoveries (or were they inventions or a combination) finally concluding that math has its limitations like in explaining where a roulette wheel and ball will end up. Anyway, the book is very interesting.

Mario Livio's latest book attempts no less than to explore the relations among mathematics, the cosmos, and the human mind. This is such an ambitious goal, that I was skeptical at first that anything of substance can be said in a popular book. However, I discovered that this book not only provides a fantastic summary of the history of the ideas in this arena, but that Livio also presents a rich tapestry of his own fresh insights. Highly recommended.

This is perhaps the most thought-provoking book that I have read in recent years.
Even though I am far from being a mathematician, I have found the discussion presented
in this book on the nature of mathematics, and on the reasons for its success as the "language"
of science, to be fascinating. Some thinkers whose names and works I recognized, and some
that I have never heard of before, literally came to life from these pages. Highly recommended.

Maybe. Or maybe not. One conclusion is certain from this book: the author does not really tackle this exact question as his main theme. His big question for the reader, rather, is: has mathematics been discovered, or has it been invented? His answer turns out to be, "yes." Sometimes he argues for the one idea, sometimes for the other, either way strongly. God, perhaps, has to rule on the case, but Mario Livio certainly does not propose this! The "Plato" approach he speaks about at length takes the "discovery" side of the debate. Oddly enough, to this reviewer the amount of time spent on Mr. Plato probably muddled the story line, rather than clarifying. Nevertheless, "Is God a Mathematician?" flowed smoothly and satisfyingly.

When treating a topic like a history in mathematics, an author could take on a theme and pick among hundreds of personages to flesh out the theme. One has the feeling that Dr. Livio did just that. Fortunately, his book gets credit for being both interesting and informative, thus worth reading. He does a fine job spelling out some technical topics for the world of us amateur, non-doctoral people. Much of the book sets up more like an anthology. The bad part: harder for the reader to keep the chapter threads connected. The good part: if you do not like a particular personage's story, you can skip to the next. Something gets lost, of course, but it may have been partially lost anyway.

For theists looking for a deity's ownership of mathematics, the author's answer is not really there. For those without religious belief, the answer would not matter anyway. So, forget the title words and enjoy the book for its stories. You might also be able to figure out the "Plato" part in more detail than did this reviewer.

I found this in the religion section of my local bookstore. It is not really about God. I'm not even sure if the author even believes in God. It is actually a brief history of mathematics that focuses on the question of if math was discovered or invented. In other words is math something man made or does it exist in some Platonic like state beyond our understanding of it.

-Wil