Reviews for Current Developments in Mathematics 1998

The average rating for Current Developments in Mathematics 1998 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-26 00:00:00 Tee Dixon It occurred to me that one of the many philosophical debates semiotics could bring some clarity to was the nature of mathematical objects, and I was excited to find a whole book dedicated to the question. But while it's provocative and occasionally interesting, I can't say this was a completely satisfying take on the question. Part of the problem is perhaps that Rotman uses an unholy blend of Saussurean and Peircean semiotics, which keeps him from developing his ideas as clearly as he needs to for this difficult subject. I was on board with some of the broad goals he laid out (anti-Platonism, constructing math from basic perceptual activities like Bloor did in Social Imagery) but I can't say I found most of his arguments very convincing. The whole bit about the Agent doing infinite operations in the mind of the mathematician seems pretty dumb and not necessarily helpful, and I just don't know if his anti-infinity crusade really follows from semiotics/is right/would lead to anything productive. Otherwise the discussion of information theory and physics and quanta all seems competent and above board, nothing outside the scope of productive philosophical discourse, but I'm not sure it really went anywhere.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-22 00:00:00 Richard Mart�nez What an interesting book! It took a while, but once it got a finger-hold in my skull, it ripped my mind wide open. Never have numbers been so interesting: "Numbers no longer simply are, either in actuality or in some idealized potentiality: they are materio-symbolic or technosemiotic entities that have to be made by materio-symbolic creatures. They and their arithmetic are always part of the larger and open-ended human initiative of constant becoming – an enterprise never free from choice, contingency, the limits of our (always material) resources, and the arbitrariness of history." The final chapter on Deleuze & Guattari really made the work resonate.