Description

Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Do numbers truly exist? What sort of reality do formulas describe?

The complexity of mathematics – its abstract rules and obscure symbols – can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes.

In this elegant book, mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, ranging widely from the paradoxes of ancient Greece to the sacred altars of India, from Mesopotamian calculus to our own contemporary obsession with algorithms.

Masterful and illuminating, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men transforms our understanding of mathematical thinking, showing that it is inextricably linked with the philosophical and the religious as well as the mundane – and, indeed, with our own very human experience of the universe.

Publisher Review

Full of interesting ideas, insightful and thought-provoking ... A stimulating book that perhaps leaves the reader with more questions than answers. That, in case you are wondering, is intended as praise -- Tony Mann * Times Higher Education * This book concerns not just the algorithms but the philosophy, history and mathematics ... Zellini recognises that the power of numbers to make realities is not just some philosophical contrivance but a defining feature of the modern condition with a history reaching back to antiquity -- Michael Barany * Spectator *