Description
Condition
LIKE NEW: This book and its dust jacket are in excellent, like-new condition.
Product Details
Continued from the dust jacket: “In Roads to Infinity, award-winning author John Stillwill explores the consequences of accepting infinity, which are rich and surprising. The read needs very little background beyond high school mathematics, but should have a willingness to grapple with alien ideas. Stillwell’s style eases the reader into the technicalities of set theory and logic by tracing a single thread in each chapter, beginning with a natural mathematical question and following a sequence of historic responses to that question. Each response typically leads to new questions, and from them new concepts and theorems emerge. At the end of each chapter a section called ‘Historical Background’ situates the thread in a bigger picture of mathematics and its history.
“By following this path, key ideas are presented first, then revisited and reinforced by showing a wider view. Some readers, however, may be impatient to get to the core theorems and will skip the historical background sections, at least at first reading. Others, in search of a big picture from the beginning, may begin by reading the historical background and then come back to fill in details.”
Chapters
- The Diagonal Argument
- Ordinals
- Computability and Proof
- Logic
- Arithmetic
- Natural Unprovable Sentences
- Axioms of Infinity
The book concludes with “Bibliography,” and “Index.”