George Epstein: Summer reading list

If your appetite for reading and learning has been muted by the effort to make a living, summertime is the season to catch up. “Alias” and “Lost” are in repeats, “The Sopranos” hasn’t cooked up a new season. It’s time to challenge yourself to some mental muscle-building. After looking over the pile of texts awaiting me for the summer, I’ve decided to provide my rationale for selecting them. Perhaps it will serve to inspire you to set your reading goals for the summer of 2005 a bit higher.

For thousands of years mathematicians believed they were different. Scientists, artists, and engineers could all do brilliant, beautiful, spectacular things, but they couldn’t be perfect. Mathematicians could achieve perfection. They could start with a few basic (perhaps even “obvious”) assumptions – stuff like two points determine a line and if a=b and b=c then a=c. Then they could prove all the rest of the important truths of math – the Pythagorean Theorem, the Four Color Theorem and all the rest. No one else in any other discipline could prove Truth.