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发帖数: 4385 | 1 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032934
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. | b******3
发帖数: 4385 | |
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