About the Book
In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping—and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements.
Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin—who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics—were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite—and led to the founding of descriptive set theory.
The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.
About the Author :
Loren Graham is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jean-Michel Kantor is a mathematician at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris.
Review :
The intellectual drama will attract readers who are interested in mystical religion and the foundations of mathematics. The personal drama will attract readers who are interested in a human tragedy with characters who met their fates with exceptional courage.
At the end of the nineteenth century, three young French mathematicians--Émile Borel, René Baire and Henri Lebesgue--built on the work of Georg Cantor to conceive a new theory of functions that in a few years transformed mathematical analysis. When their work met with skepticism, they began to doubt it and abandoned further investigation. In Russia, under the leadership of Dmitry Egorov, a group of Moscow mathematicians picked up the torch. Animated by a mystical tradition known as Name Worshipping, they found the creativity to name the new objects of the French theory of functions. And they changed the face of the mathematical world.
A passionate confluence of mathematical creation and mystical practices is at the center of this extraordinary account of the emergence of set theory in Russia in the early twentieth century. The starkly drawn contrast with mathematical developments in France illuminates the story, and the book is electric with portraits of the great mathematicians involved: the tragic, the unfortunate, the villainous, the truly admirable. The authors offer an account of Infinity that is brief, deft, serious, and accessible to non-mathematicians, and their evocation of the mathematical circles of the period is so intimately written that one feels as if one had lived, worked, and suffered alongside the protagonists. Graham and Kantor have given us an amazing piece of mathematical history.
Last week I read one of the most interesting books I've encountered so far this year, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, just published by Harvard University Press. I'll be writing more about this book, but in the meantime I wanted to let you know about it. Many books in the science-and-religion conversation tediously cover the same ground. This book comes from a fresh angle--the world of mathematics and the world of "science" are not the same, but they overlap--and it tells a fascinating story. I found it absolutely riveting. And it's encouraging to see two secular scholars doing their best to be scrupulously fair in representing religious thinkers whose worldview is very different from their own.
It is a story of the persistence of intellectual life against the wrecking tide of history.
In the early 20th century, mathematicians grappled with the concept of infinity, relying heavily on set theory to prove and define it. The French mathematicians, rationalists not fond of abstraction (particularly abstractions with spiritual overtones), went head-to-head with the Russians, who had always linked mathematics to philosophy, religion and ideology. Name Worshipping played a key role in bringing the two closer together. Graham and Kantor do a beautiful job of fleshing out the key players in this gripping drama--nothing less than a struggle to prove the existence of God.
This absorbing book tells astonishing stories about some of the most important developments in mathematics of the past century...Perhaps the most moving section of the book is that dealing with the famous Moscow School of Mathematics in Soviet times. Its origins are traced to the Lusitania seminar established by Egorov and Luzin (the source of the name "Lusitania" is obscure). The enthusiasm that these teachers inspired in their students is clearly conveyed, as is the atmosphere of intellectual excitement, despite the freezing lecture rooms (the rule that lectures could not take place if the room temperature fell below -5C was ignored)...This is a remarkable book, illuminating the history of 20th-century mathematics and its practitioners. The stories it tells are important and too little known. It is clearly a labor of love and deserves a wide audience: it is an outstanding portrayal of mathematics as a fundamentally human activity and mathematicians as human beings.
The most unusual book I have read this year.
Fifty years ago, C. P. Snow gave a soon-to-be famous lecture on the "Two Cultures" of modern society, the culture of the humanities and the culture of science, and the need to bridge the gap between them. Today we are more likely to hear debates about the alleged gulf between science and religion. Both divides are bridged in this superb book, which takes us from French rationalism at the turn of the 20th century to a thriving center of world-class mathematics in Moscow, where the presiding figures were also devout Russian Orthodox believers of a mystical bent.
Naming Infinity is a short, accessible book about mathematical imagination...Naming Infinity is a straightforward, kinetic, and seductive read...In describing the life trajectories of their subjects, the authors are unafraid to take sides, show their sympathies, even judge. There is something refreshingly honest in their striving to be fair to their real-life characters without feigned impartiality. This considered generosity and the passion that shows itself in the copious quantities of documentary and anecdotal evidence gathered by Loren Graham in Russia, make the book a fascinating read...Just as a stimulating conversation, even when left incomplete, opens the mind to new ideas, Naming Infinity suggests new ways of thinking about mathematical creativity and intellectual excellence.
This is not only a readable book, but a most worthwhile one, insofar as it offers a series of anecdotal life-stories of remarkable people, little known save to specialists, together with valuable insights into the Soviet Union of the 1930s.
As Naming Infinity so sensitively shows, escaping the world we live in, and the exacting parameters of reason, can sometimes lead to surprising results. As powerful as the gift of rationalism may be, there is still more in heaven and earth.
