A Certain Ambiguity

I never knew that a novel about Mathematics could be possible. And to top it off, it also has such a great plot. This book also tackles about the philosophy, beauty, and the importance of Mathematics to the humans and the world.

On the first part of the story, Ravi Kapoor, the main character, remembers the time when his grandfather gave him a mathematical problem to solve on his calculator but then the grandfather dies the next day. After he dies, the Ravi becomes indifferent towards mathematics.

Ravi then gets accepted to Stanford and takes up a career in Statistics. While taking the subject “Thinking about Infinity”, he then befriends Professor Nico who also specializes in the same field as his grandfather. Nico finds a paper which was developed by Ravi’s grandfather while in jail. Then the story separates into two narrations, Nico presents math topics where “infinity” is the main topic and Ravi researches on his grandfather and discovers that he produced records of philosophical discussions on the nature of truth, certainty and mathematics while on jail.

This book discussed about Zeno's paradoxes and infinitude of primes through Godel's Incompleteness and Paul Cohen's Consistency theorems. This book also talks about the importance of axiomatic method. Overall it was an informative and interesting read. The book was full of informations about mathematics and even philosophy.