Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity - Hardcover

Graham, Loren; Kantor, Jean-Michel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674032934 ISBN 13: 9780674032934

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2009

Synopsis

In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping―and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements.

Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin―who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics―were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite―and led to the founding of descriptive set theory.

The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and ­creativity.

About this title

About the Authors

Loren Graham is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jean-Michel Kantor is a mathematician at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris.

Reviews

*Starred Review* How did a country wracked by civil war, devastated by famine, and overshadowed by tyranny incubate a major breakthrough in modern mathematics? In the origins of descriptive set theory, Graham and Kantor (both self-described secular rationalists) confront the puzzling cultural dynamics that converted religious mysticism into mathematical insight. The authors particularly probe the surprising way that a religious heresy (Name Worshipping) emboldened the Russian mathematicians who finally surmounted the theoretical difficulties that had overwhelmed earlier pioneers in set theory. Though readers unschooled in higher mathematics may stumble over some concepts (such as denumberable subsets or the hierarchy of alephs), the authors generally succeed in translating principles into a nonspecialist’s vocabulary. Readers thus share in both the perplexities of the French rationalists defeated by the mysteries of infinite sets and the triumphs of the Russian scholars who penetrated those mysteries by deploying strategies strangely similar to devotional practices for naming the Divine. But the authors illuminate more than the psychology of a mathematical revolution; their narrative also exposes the tangle of ideological ambitions and sexual passions that transformed some brilliant researchers into treacherous tools of Soviet inquisitors and doomed others as their victims. A candid and searching analysis, restoring human drama to seemingly sterile formulas.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0674032934
• ISBN 13: 9780674032934
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256