Moving and enlightening, A Certain Ambiguity authored by Gaurav Suri
and Hartosh Singh Bal is a story about what it means to face the
extent--and the limits--of human knowledge. A rough
outline of the scope of the discussions threaded through the book, but the
skillfully laid out plot allows the authors present additional view points, in
particular that adopted by the present day mathematical community. There is so
much on the book, of philosophy, of mathematics, even of pedagogy, there is no
way a short review may give a due credit to this masterpiece. But one
additional observation is well warranted. The authors have managed to present
mathematics as a human endeavor by many timely excerpts from the diaries and
correspondence of great mathematicians and scientists. These, as the rest of
the book, are mostly a work of fiction, but succeed infallibly in endowing
mathematics with a human face.
The book is a delightful
and very informative to read. In the Epilogue, Ravi eventually preferred a
career in mathematics to a probably more prosperous one in economics. We are
given to understand that he had married Claire, a math student he met at the infinity
course. Truth be told, it was a little disappointed. For, while reading the
book and sensing the evolving romance between Ravi and Claire, I'd been hoping
that the authors would expand the side story into a sequel in the same genre.
Indeed the book is all
about mathematics, about its philosophy, its
beauty and about its relevance to the human understanding of the surrounding
world. There is not a page where mathematics or mathematicians are not
mentioned. Mathematics is woven inextricably into the story line itself and I
would say that the plot evolves with the mathematical precision.
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