A Divine Language
Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age
ISBN10: 1250168597
ISBN13: 9781250168597
Trade Paperback
304 Pages
$19.00
CA$25.00
Decades after struggling to understand math as a boy, Alec Wilkinson decides to embark on a journey to learn it as a middle-aged man. What begins as a personal challenge—and it is challenging—soon transforms into something greater than a belabored effort to learn math. Despite his incompetence, Wilkinson encounters a universe of unexpected questions in his pursuit of mathematical knowledge and quickly becomes fascinated; soon, his exercise in personal growth (and torture) morphs into an intellectually expansive exploration.
In A Divine Language, Wilkinson, a contributor to The New Yorker for more than forty years, journeys into the heart of the divine aspects of mathematics—its mysteries, difficulties, and revelations—from antiquity to the present. As he submits himself to the lure of deep mathematics, he takes the reader through his investigations into the subject’s big questions: number theory and the creation of numbers, the debate over math’s human or otherworldly origins, problems and equations that remain unsolved after centuries, the conundrum of prime numbers. Writing with warm humor and sharp observation as he traverses practical math’s endless frustrations and rewards, Wilkinson provides an awe-inspiring account of an adventure in a land of strange sights. Part memoir, part metaphysical travel book, and part journey in self-improvement, A Divine Language is one man’s second attempt at understanding the numbers in front of him and the world beyond.
BOOK EXCERPTS
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Fall
1.
I don’t see how it can harm me now to reveal that I only passed math in high school because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations and...