Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (Belknap Press)

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In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping—and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin—who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics—were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite—and led to the founding of descriptive set theory. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and ­creativity. (20090310)

Author(s): Loren Graham, Jean-Michel Kantor
Edition: 1
Year: 2009

Language: English
Pages: 256
Tags: Математика;История математики;

Contents......Page 6
Illustrations......Page 8
Introduction......Page 14
Storming a Monastery......Page 20
A Crisis in Mathematics......Page 32
The French Trio: Borel, Lebesgue, Baire......Page 46
The Russian Trio: Egorov, Luzin, Florensky......Page 79
Russian Mathematics and Mysticism......Page 104
The Legendary Lusitania......Page 114
Fates of the Russian Trio......Page 138
Lusitania and After......Page 175
The Human in Mathematics, Then and Now......Page 201
Luzin’s Personal Archives......Page 218
Notes......Page 225
Acknowledgments......Page 241
Index......Page 244