Mathematics

In this Very Short Introduction Philip K. Maini describes the art of modeling, what it is, why we do it, and illustrates how the abstract way of thinking that is the essence of mathematics enables us to transfer knowledge from one area of research to another.

Shoulders of Giants is a narrative history of how mathematics revealed the hidden forces shaping the modern world. From the geometry of ancient Greece to the emergence of electromagnetic theory, this audiobook follows the thinkers who transformed abstract symbols into practical tools — ideas that eventually carried signals, voices, and energy across continents. Along the way appear vivid portraits of mathematicians and physicists grappling with space, motion, light, and invisible fields, driven as much by obsession and rivalry as by curiosity.

Mathematics has long been regarded as the purest expression of truth — a language through which the universe reveals itself. Yet behind every equation stands the human mind that created it. In this book, Boris Krieger follows the path of mathematics from its simplest intuitions to its highest abstractions, asking what it truly reveals — about reality, and about ourselves. Through lucid reflection and critical insight, he shows that geometry, algebra, topology, and probability are not independent worlds but translations of human perception into structure.

Why does mathematics—a creation of the human mind—describe the physical world with such extraordinary precision? Why do equations invented for one purpose turn out, decades or centuries later, to be the perfect language for a completely different realm of nature? In 1960, the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner called this correspondence a 'gift we neither understand nor deserve.' The question has haunted science ever since. In this book, Boris Kriger proposes an answer that is at once simple and profound: mathematics describes the world because only the mathematically structured survives.

I saggi di questo volume, che toccano la politica, la religione, la letteratura, la filosofia, la matematica e la scienza, sono raccolti in sezioni che si aprono con interviste immaginarie a personaggi del passato (Hitler, Gesù, Dante, Aristotele, Archimede, Newton) e si chiudono con interviste reali a quelli del presente (Chomsky, il Dalai Lama, Saramago, Kripke, Nash e Watson). Nel mezzo, il matematico impertinente dispiega l'arsenale della ragione per argomentare che non è affatto vero che non possiamo non dirci cristiani, o che siamo tutti americani.