Descripción

Euclid in the Rainforest is an earnest, rambling rehash of conventional topics in popular mathematics, spiced with disjointed tales of mathematical conversations in exotic places. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, «Logic», treats the logic used in Euclid’s Elements and the logic formalized by Aristotle (taken to be the same). According to Mazur, this kind of logic is unable to deal with infinity. The second part, «Infinity», discusses such things as the nature of irrational numbers and Cantor’s distinction between countable and uncountable sets. The third part, «Reality», is supposed to be about «plausible reasoning», but in fact is mostly concerned with probability theory.