Category: books

From Paul Davies’s “The Eerie Silence: Searching for Ourselves in the Universe”:

The knowledge that an alien community had endured for eons and overcome the multiple problems that mankind currently faces would rekindle human Utopian dreams and become a strong unifying force on our planet. To glimpse a trajectory of human progress mirrored in the stars would have a galvanizing effect far greater than any political rhetoric. In our present state of ignorance it is possible to believe either account of the future: pessimistic or optimistic. But to know we are not the only sentient beings in a mysterious and sometimes frightening universe would provide a dramatic message of hope for mankind.

From Eugenia Cheng’s “The Joy of Abstraction,” arguably the finest general-audience math book written in the recent past:

Subtlety and nuance are aspects of thinking that I find myself missing and longing for in daily life. So much of our discourse has become black-and-white in futile attempts to be decisive, or to grab attention, or to make devastating arguments, or to shout down the opposition. Higher-dimensional category theory trains us in balancing nuance with rigor so that we don’t need to resort to black-and-white, and so that we don’t want to either.

I think mathematics is a spectacular controlled environment in which to practice this kind of thinking. The aim is that even if the theory is not directly applicable in the rest of our lives, the thinking becomes second nature. This is how I have found category theory to help me in everyday life, surprising though it may sound.

From one of my favorite novels, which has the great Soviet mathematician and economics Nobelist Leonid Kantorovich as one of the lead characters.

It was a pleasure to put the lucid order in his [Kantorovich’s] head to use. More than a pleasure, a relief almost, because every time the pure pattern of mathematics turned out to have a purchase on the way the world worked, turned out to provide the secret thread controlling something loud and various and apparently arbitrary, it provided one more quantum of confirmation for what Leonid Vitalevich wanted to believe, needed to believe, did believe when he was happy: that all of this, this swirl of phenomena lurching on through time, this mess of interlocked systems, some filigree-fine, some huge and simple, this tram full of strangers and smoky air, this city of Peter built on human bones, all ultimately made sense, were all intricately generated by some intelligible principle or set of principles working themselves out on many levels at once, even if the expressions didn’t exist yet which could capture much of the process.

Francis Spufford, “Red Plenty”