For the first time in forever

            As I read the title of this book, my mind was boggled by the paradoxical statement. A certain ambiguity indeed encapsulates how I have interpreted it and how I felt after reading it. However, one thing is for sure, I didn’t really enjoy it much and I was quite bored and distracted due to the overloaded information that this book brought about. This book review will not be a very good one because I was distracted while writing this for I was not really into reading the book but still, it was quite enjoyable and I really do not know how I feel after reading that. So here it goes anyway..

            It opened up with our main character, Ravi Kapoor, as he reminisces his childhood and in it, he remembered how his mathematician grandfather influenced him in liking mathematics like teaching him mathematical tricks and giving him a calculator on his 12^th birthday. But the interest gradually faded after his grandfather’s death. The loss of his grandfather was definitely a great factor of him being unresponsive towards mathematics. The next highlight was when our main character studied in Stanford University but wasn’t really sure of what he wanted exactly. Then he met a professor whose name was Dr. Nico Aliprantis who summoned him and his friend Peter, to take his class which was “Thinking about Infinity” and they agreed. This professor of his knew his grandfather because of one of his papers. In this same class, our main character also meets the love of his life which was Claire whom he marries eventually. She was a gardener who had a particular interest in mathematics. In this class, the main focus of the mathematical topics was strongly pointed towards the idea of infinity. In here, they learned the concepts like Zeno’s paradox, Cantor’s theory of transfinite cardinals, Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of set theory, the independence of the continuum hypothesis, etc.

            Then, Ravi discovers that his grandfather was detained because he was accused of blasphemy because he does not believe in the existence of God and he supported his claim through the use of nothing more than mathematical knowledge. It was a very sad realization that people were not able to speak their minds freely in those times because freedom of speech and expression were not really accepted by the society. The conversations of Ravi’s grandfather and the judge were also very fascinating. In the said conversations, they have discussed about Euclidean theorems which tried to define the conviction and inevitability of mathematics. There was also the mathematical axiomatic method discussion between the two.

Despite the fact that this book was jampacked with mathematical ideas, topics etc., which kind of made me stare on to my screen, I still liked how elaborative the authors have been in this book (If only I were that interested in mathematics, maybe I’d appreciate it better). But there was one statement that really disturbed me and that was “Christians are people who gave up on reason.” I actually beg to disagree because as I have seen and read in some references, philosophers and scientists have been using mathematics, science, philosophy and the likes in order to prove God’s existence. So there goes all the reasoning that is needed.  I would like to elaborate more on that bit but I’d rather not ‘cause I don’t want to go all philosophical here and this is a mere book review so I’ll stick to the reacting part but yeah you get my point.

There is really nothing more to say and I still haven’t reached 900 words so I’ll just keep on blabbering. But I did learn stuff which I’m not really sure how I could apply into real life situations. Stuff like the lessons that they discussed in Dr. Aliprantis’ classes were dumbfounding (just because I don’t understand them) but they were interesting all the same and if I would have some free time, I might read some more about those (maybe, I doubt about that free time though). Maybe in the future, I’d look back and remember this novel and read it again. This book has definitely given much information for its readers to internalize but it would really depend on the reader. This book would really be recommended for those who are mathematically inclined (and not those who major in Biology lol). I guess the title refers on how philosophical mathematics really is and I guess some things should be left uncertain because in that uncertainty, the limit does not exist.