[Book Reviews]

Abstract

THE author of this interesting book has achieved a difficult task with much distinction, in showing that number, which is considered as the ‘driest’ topic on earth, could be made the basis of a profoundly human story. From the use of finger-prints to the invention of transfinite numbers, we are told how the theory of numbers, born in religious mysticism, has passed through a period of erratic puzzle-solving before it acquired the status of a science. Yet the book is not a technical history of the subject; so that it should interest not only mathematicians but also the wider circle of those who like to ask themselves how science has come about. Symbols are scarcely used; but the historical method has been freely introduced to bring out the rôle intuition has played in the evolution of mathematical concepts. This novel and pleasant presentation of an intricate subject is a great credit to its author.

Number: the Language of Science.

Prof. Tobias Dantzig. Pp. xi + 260 + 11 plates. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1930.) 10s. net.