Two for the Road

Two for the Road one ignorant of geometry enter,” warned the inscription at the door of Plato’s Academy. Math has never since enjoyed such prominent status in the curriculum of a liberal education, and nowadays it must compete for students’ attention with Jacques (“the tyranny of reason”) Derrida and Michel (“reason is torture”) Foucault. While mountebanks like that stalk the corridors of our uni- versities, it does not help to portray math—the purest expression of human reason—as the domain of oddities like Nash and Erdös.

Nor does it help that all three of these books contain mathematical bloopers. Sylvia Nasar comes off best here, but even she makes a pig’s ear of explaining the fabulous Riemann hypothesis. Mr Hoffman, in a very embarrassing passage, makes it plain he does not understand the mathematical meaning of the word “transcendental.” Bruce Schechter speaks of the “graceful catenaries” of the bridges over the Danube at Budapest. The cables of a suspension bridge form parabolas, not catenaries. 1 don’t expect my dentist to know this stuff, but the authors of books about mathematicians really should. NR

JR

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John Reader

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Two for the Road one ignorant of geometry enter,” warned the inscription at the door of Plato’s Academy. Math has never since enjoyed such prominent status in the curriculum of a liberal education, and nowadays it must compete for students’ attention with Jacques (“the tyranny of reason”) Derrida and Michel (“reason is torture”) Foucault. While mountebanks like that stalk the corridors of our uni- versities, it does not help to portray math—the purest expression of human reason—as the domain of oddities like Nash and Erdös.

Nor does it help that all three of these books contain mathematical bloopers. Sylvia Nasar comes off best here, but even she makes a pig’s ear of explaining the fabulous Riemann hypothesis. Mr Hoffman, in a very embarrassing passage, makes it plain he does not understand the mathematical meaning of the word “transcendental.” Bruce Schechter speaks of the “graceful catenaries” of the bridges over the Danube at Budapest. The cables of a suspension bridge form parabolas, not catenaries. 1 don’t expect my dentist to know this stuff, but the authors of books about mathematicians really should. NR