A Certain Ambiguity: Book Review

Most books that you find that has the subject mathematics in it usually are usually for educational purposes. But this novel is not only compelling, plot wise, but the beautiful and rich mathematics that was woven perfectly with the storyline. It truly is a unique approach to finding certainty to the world of mathematics and philosophy.

            Mathematics is commonly known to be the doorway to absolute truth and certainty. This book made a good job on presenting that idea, that through pure reasoning and logic we can achieve greater knowledge. Math is the closest thing we can get to achieving absolute certainty. However the book also does an excellent job on connecting the pure and concrete math with the irrational and unreasonable human condition.

            Many theorems were discussed such as Zeno's paradoxes and infinitude of primes through Godel's Incompleteness and Paul Cohen's Consistency theorems. One can safely assume that the authors have some kind of degree in math. But the discussion of these mathematical models isn’t what makes this a unique book but rather the human/emotional side of mathematics, which is ironic since, stated before, math is concrete and logical. As any content in a novel the rich story maintains the readers interest but the authors spiced in deep mathematics. As someone who isn’t keen on mathematics there might be some mathematical passages which are a bit difficult or abstract to fully understand, but the book doesn’t put in like a PhD dissertation but just presents the passages as is.

            You could argue that is a new genre, a novel with a captivating plot and beautiful story line yet has a rational mathematical and philosophical side. It’s a beautiful piece about its relevance to the human understating of the surrounding world.