Truth. Faith. And Infinity.
These three words resound all throughout the book, A Certain Ambiguity, with the lives of
Ravi and Bauji (his grandfather) intertwined along with it.
Nico Aliprantis, one of the characters in the book said
“I think that mathematics is beautiful at its core; it is much more like a
musical piece than an accounting formula.” By this I have concluded that the
authors primarily wanted to convey to their readers that mathematics is delightful.
I wanted to agree; and by seeing and reading many mathematical formulae (which
is by the way, too dense for my level) and its philosophy (which for the first
time I have encountered with less technicality) in a novel, I agreed that even
mathematics is beautiful.
(Well, on an outsiders’ perspective that is. I’m not
that into math.)
However, although mathematics is beautiful and
interesting and encompasses an extremely wide range of knowledge that most of
us can’t dive into, I still believe that mathematics can’t lead us to the
‘truth’ (whatever kind of truth people look for); I still believe that faith is greater than pure reasoning and of human knowledge; And the more I believe
that we can’t simply contain the idea of infinity to just some formula or
theory or law.
Although some parts of the book disturbed me, I still
credit the authors for a good literary piece –gluing math and its concepts with
a dramatic plot of a person’s life is hard work.
And even though a lot of passages in the book shook my
convictions and angered me, I still found something valuable from this reading,
just like what Prof. Aliprantis told Ravi:
“Ravi, in my opinion every person should choose a life path that allows
himself to nurture this sense of order and connectedness. That’s what your
grandfather did, and that’s what –in his way– Judge Taylor did as well, and
that’s what I think you should do.”
And that’s what I’m going to do.
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