Absolute Certainty

A book review to A Certain Ambiguity, A Mathematical Novel

A Certain Ambiguity, A Mathematical Novel is a brilliant and unusual novel which is a book that subjects mathematics, regarding its philosophy, beauty and about its relevance to the surrounding world.

The story mainly gyrates with Ravi Kapoor, a Stanford student taking a course on "Infinity" and his grandfather who was jailed for blasphemy in constitute to a philosophical investigation of the nature of truth, faith and certainty in mathematics. The narrative started with a flashback of the experience of the main characters, to the time when his mathematician grandfather had given Ravi a mathematical problem which conferred him the appreciation of the magical effect of a solution might have. Ravi taking up a course thinking about infinity, he had a professor who specialized in the field of Ravi’s grandfather. As the story goes on, a lot of mathematics had been discussed. The Zeno's paradox, Convergence of Infinite Sums, Cantor's Theory of Transfinite Cardinals, Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms of Set Theory and the Independence of the Continuum Hypothesis, also about the axiomatic Euclidian geometry. Those were at the heart of the mathematical discussion. Throughout the book it presented ideas in the form of journal entries from famous historical mathematicians including Euclid, Riemann, Gauss and Cantor. Later he had been married to atalented mathematician named Claire.

This novel illustrated the making of difficult mathematical ideas accessible in which it does not only expose the tremendous difficulty of blending science and logic with the emotion and dramatic tension. It has the equal proportions of certainty, ambiguity, frustration and joy that succeeded both as a compelling novel and in the intellectual tour through some starting of mathematical ideas being discovered.

For me, the greatest positive feature of this book is letting the readers understand the starting point of mathematics as a discipline. We all know about great mathematicians and all the theorems, axioms and principles they had discovered and added to the horrific long list of those, but only in this book I had learned about its basis as a subject.  Also this book had a very unique approach for dealing mathematics with a touch of a real story going on between the characters. It took as to another side which is the emotional mathematics most mathematician feels. It can be construed that mathematics can be an entryway to absolute truth and absolute certainty through pure reasoning. The book did a good job of presenting this viewpoint that had given anyone an appreciation to mathematical logic.