The author of a pop-math book must decide, before he sets finger on keyboard, how much he is going to demand of his readers in the way of willingness to engage with actual mathematics. As is often the case in writing, what is easier for the author is more difficult for the reader, and vice... Read More

The relevant library shelves in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences hold no less than eighteen different general histories of mathematics in English. The author setting out to write yet another such book must therefore have an angle (so to speak), some original approach to the topic. What is David Berlinski's angle? "Short" doesn't cut... Read More

That is from Bertrand Russell's autobiography. What was stumping him was the attempt to find a definition of "number" in terms of pure logic. What does "three," for example, actually mean? The German logician Gottlob Frege had come up with an answer: "three" is merely the set of all threesomes, the set of all those... Read More

I find it difficult to speak temperately about Martin Gardner because I owe him so much. As a child in England, my keenest intellectual pleasure was reading Gardner's monthly "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. Along with a handful of books like Kasner and Newman's Mathematics and the Imagination and George Gamow's One Two Three... Read More

Suppose I ask you to step into the next room, count the people in there, and report the answer back to me. What is the smallest number you can report? Obviously the answer is zero, corresponding to the case when there are no people at all in the next room. Thus it is plain that... Read More