
Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, "The Art of The Infinite: The Pleasures of Mathematics"
Oxford | ISBN: 0-19-514743-X | 324 Pages | PDF | 2.6 Mb
We commonly think of ourselves as little and lost in the infinite stretches of time and space, so that it comes as a shock when the French poet Baudelaire speaks of cradling our infinite on the finite seas. Really? Is it ourself, our mind or spirit, that is infinitys proper home? Or might the infinite be neither out there nor in here but only in language, a pretty conceit of poetry?
We are the language makers, and what we express always refers to somethingthough not, perhaps, to what we first thought it did. Talk of the infinite naturally belongs to that old, young, ageless conversation about number and shape which is mathematics: a conversation most of us overhear rather than partake in, put off by its haughty abstraction. Mathematics promises certaintybut at the cost, it seems, of passion. Its initiates speak of playfulness and freedom, but all we come up against in school are boredom and fear, wedged between iron rules memorized without reason.
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