Just Curious

Book reviews

Gosh, I've been such a speed-reader these days. Just finished reading the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy (1923).

I'll have to write some brief reviews on these books, and hopefully I'll start doing it once my policy fellowship program in Washington D.C. is over. By the time then I should also have finished reading Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class.

In the meantime, I bought a mammoth of a treatise, called Mathematics: Its contents, methods and meaning. It was a collection of essays on literally every branch of math one could think of, and was written by a group of former Soviet mathematicians. The editors are Professors Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov (possibly the greatest mathematician in the 20th century), and Lev'rentev. A.N. Kolmogorov himself wrote the chapter on probability, a field he literally helped established.

Topics include a general overview, analysis, algebra, ordinary and differential equations, computational mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry, theory of the function of a complex variable, theory of the function of a real variable, modern algebra, probability and statistics, topology and functional analysis. There are also some exposition on mathematical logic.

I think I will not read the whole thing, but instead read the topics not covered in my own mathematical education in school.

posted by James Chang @ 1:07 PM