eon

Posted by tpc at January 24th, 2009

I’ve recently came across several good books that are recently published by PUP and I’m further impressed by that fact that their books are usually cheaper than Springer and significantly cheaper than Oxford. I really liked the Fourier Analysis and the Complex Analysis titles in the four part series by Stein and Shakarchi. Another book that I really liked was Google’s PageRank and Beyond by Langville and Meyer.

They also published quite a number of general maths book. One of which I’ve wrote about. It’s not always hits. One that I didn’t like was A Certain Ambiguity by Suri and Bal which is a fiction. It started out promising, a young Indian studying in stanford saw a reprint of a paper by his grandfather (who was based in India) with the footnote that ideas came to him during his term in prison in the US. So he set out to discover how his grandfather was incarcerated. Then the story unravels in two lines, a transcript of conversations between his grandfather and a judge, plus a parallel line where the protagonist learns mathematics in a class. There is also a third fictional line in the form of journals of famous mathematicians. Much of the action is actually discussion on mathematics focusing on geometry and the 5th postulate, and also ideas on logic, truth, Cantor’s theory of infinity. Somehow, I just don’t find the book engaging at all and I particularly dislike it when authors take liberties in fictionalizing real mathematicians.

Isn’t it funny how I have so much to say about books I don’t like and not much to say about those I recommend.