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Une brève histoire des maths: La saga de notre science préférée
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Une brève histoire des maths: La saga de notre science préférée
Unavailable
Une brève histoire des maths: La saga de notre science préférée
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Une brève histoire des maths: La saga de notre science préférée

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Tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu savoir sur les plus grands mathématiciens de l'Histoire

Descartes, Euclide, Leibniz, Newton… Cinq ans après l’incroyable succès de La Vie rêvée des Maths, David Berlinski, le célèbre mathématicien philosophe, revient avec un nouveau volume tout aussi captivant.

Au fil d’anecdotes historiques, il passe en revue la vie et l’œuvre des plus grands mathématiciens. Son style accessible et amusé plonge le lecteur dans l’aventure envoûtante et inattendue des mathématiques.

Sous sa plume, théorèmes, axiomes, fonctions et démonstrations n’ont plus de secrets. Berlinski réussit avec cet ouvrage l’équation impossible entre les chiffres et les lettres.

David Berlinski invite le lecteur à découvrir les théories mathématiques au fil des siècles.

CE QU'EN PENSE LA CRITIQUE

- "De la littérature scientifique atteignant la perfection. Il n’est pas simplement facile à lire ; parce qu’il est extrêmement intelligent, ce livre peut aussi inspirer des professionnels." (N. N. Taleb, Professeur à l’Université du Massachusetts)
- "Une histoire des maths amusante et pleine de grâce, incroyablement facile à lire" (G. Chaitin, Chercheur au Centre IBM Thomas J. Watson)

A PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR 

Philosophe et mathématicien, David Berlinski est né à New York en 1942. Il a été professeur à Columbia, Stanford et Rutgers. Il vit aujourd’hui à Paris où il se consacre exclusivement à l’écriture. Il est l’auteur de nombreux romans et essais parmi lesquels figurent le Don de Newton et la Vie d’Albert Einstein (Simon & Schuster, 2001) et Une petite histoire des mathématiques (Random House, 2001).

EXTRAIT

L’histoire des mathématiques commence en 532 av. J.-C., année de naissance du mathématicien grec Pythagore. Fuyant son île natale de Samos pour échapper au tyran Polycrate, Pythagore voyagea en Égypte où, comme tant de jeunes Grecs impressionnables, il « apprit des Égyptiens le nombre et la mesure [et] fut stupéfait de la sagesse des prêtres… »
Par la suite, il s’installa dans le Sud de l’Italie, se mit à enseigner et attira rapidement des disciples. On dispose de très peu d’informations directes sur sa vie, si ce n’est que ses contemporains le tenaient pour admirable. Aucun de ses écrits n’a été retrouvé ; mais il a échappé à l’oubli, préservé par l’ambre de divers témoignages littéraires. L’admission dans la secte pythagoricienne reposait naturellement sur les compétences mathématiques. L’observation du secret était de mise, et les fèves, bannies du régime alimentaire. Les nouveaux membres devaient garder le silence pendant plusieurs années, politique qu’aujourd’hui encore de nombreux enseignants trouveront exemplaire, et étaient censés mettre ce laps de temps à profit pour méditer et réfléchir.
LanguageFrançais
Release dateDec 3, 2014
ISBN9782915134797
Unavailable
Une brève histoire des maths: La saga de notre science préférée

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    An Ill-Conceived Practical Joke?At the time that I ordered this book, I had a natural inclination to be sympathetic with its author, since his reputation indicated that he and I had similar views about politics and the philosophy of science. That only increased my disappointment when this ended up being one of the least enlightening and most annoying books I've ever encountered. If Berlinski is as talented as I'd been led to believe, it's hard not to interpret _Infinite Ascent_ as either some sort of practical joke or a rush job to fulfill a contract.In _Infinite Ascent_, Berlinski has a tendency to wax grandiloquent, using metaphors and similes that serve no evident purpose and are sometimes downright bizarre, as when, for example, he likens sets and their elements to the male anatomy (p. 129). Following this up one page later with Berlinski's fantasy about schoolgirls with "their starched shirt fronts covering their gently heaving bosoms" (p. 130) does nothing to ameliorate concern about the author's tendency to get distracted.One of Berlinski's running themes is the use of "..." in mathematics to represent the continuation of a pattern. He likes to joke about this so much that he starts inserting these dots in his formulas needlessly, just to get to comment on them. For example, instead of just writing down the (extremely short) formula for subtracting complex numbers (p. 69), he leaves an ellipsis and then states that "the crutch of three dots [covers] the transmogrification of a plus to a minus sign and nothing more."Some of Berlinski's comments are real head-stratchers: "[The Elements] is very clear, succint as a knife blade. And like every good textbook, it is incomprehensible." (p. 14); "[Exponential functions] mount up inexorably, one reason that they are often used to represent doubling processes in biology, as when undergraduates divide uncontrollably within a Petri dish." (p. 71). Huh?_Infinite Ascent_ has few formulas or other concrete mathematical details, and what there is is often wrong. The formulas for the solutions to quartic equations of quadratic type are botched (p. 93), roots of equations are confused with zeros of functions (p. 80), inscribed rectangles are described while circumscribed rectangles are drawn (p. 56), and g12*du1*du2 is misidentified as a formula for the infinitesimal distance between the points u1 and u2 (p. 120). The sections on logic are the ones Berlinski handles most competently, but even that has been covered better by many others.Berlinski thinks that Weierstrass's definition of limit is "infinitely wearisome" (p. 145) and is "promptly forgotten" by mathematicians after they have learned it. I think most analysts would disagree strongly with his opinion, and would classify the definition of limit among those things they couldn't forget if they wanted to. (That Berlinski himself very well might have forgotten it is suggested by his unconventional decision to use the letter delta to represent a *large* index (p. 61) in his definition of the limit of a sequence.)Berlinski opines that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (connecting differentiation to definite integration) is something that "no one at all would expect". On the contrary, I consider it to be eminently plausible. Berlinski also describes the classic math book _Counterexamples in Analysis_ as consisting of "a series of misleading proofs supporting theorems that are not theorems." _Counterexamples in Analysis_ actually contains nothing of the sort. Rather than containing fallacious "proofs" of non-theorems, it contains exactly what its title says it does: Counterexamples (i.e., examples that show why the hypotheses of (true) theorems are necessary and why stronger conclusions are unwarranted).
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A 4 for content...a 2 for usefulness...This book has bouts of brilliance but was short on usefulness. I found myself time and again asking what the point of this book was. I wasn't sure if Berlinski was happy that math has taken the turns that it did or if he is waiting for the next mathematical revolution. I'm not sure that I would recommend this book to anyone because I don't know what type of person would find it remotely intriguing.