une certaine ambiguïté

The authors did an excellent job in creating this book. They have set to reconcile the mathematics and the religious faith in this book that is wrapped in a thin plot.

I can say that any book that tried to dig this deep philosophical matter is a direct suspect for an ending that is a crap or a kind of garbage, but “A Certain Ambiguity” managed to end the story leaving the reader thoughtful, and because of this, the authors really did a very good job.

The main character in this novel is Ravi, an Indian student in Stanford University who enrolls in a math class called “Thinking about infinity”. Ravi engages on a quasi-philosophical together with their class lecturer and a small group of friends, guided by court records of his grandfather’s discussions with a judge in the early 20s.

This book contains a lot of interesting facts about math, and the philosophical connections are well developed and very believable even though most of it is on the basic level. This book can be a non-fiction work because its main theme is quite real and it deals with the epistemological questions that the real philosophers have struggled with, throughout the centuries. It is unlikely to change your view of life, but it will induce some of the interesting thinking on the important topics.

I was surprised to find out that this book did a good job in explaining the faith to the people with rational or mathematical view of life. However, it only rationalized the core faith which is Judge Taylor’s “creation axiom” can’t really be disproven. But as Judge Taylor told Vijay, his deductive method was solid and only his axioms were the one that were at question. In any way, the faith that Judge Taylor rationalized as an axiom can’t connect to the modern monotheistic religions, not to mention the polytheistic ones, because it broke down immediately as soon as the first deductions were made from it about the actual human lives. The axiom “everything must be created by something” is an axiom that cannot be proven at the moment, but any attempt to prove that Jesus was born to a virgin and walked on water from it would have to go beyond the limit of its deductive methods.

All in all, I can say that you have to read this book, or should I say I really recommend this book for you to read. Actually, this made me think hard about the philosophical implications of the basic mathematical axioms, and this also encouraged me to read more on the subject mathematics.