Reviews for Women's Talk? A Social History of 'Gossip' in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960

The average rating for Women's Talk? A Social History of 'Gossip' in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-20 00:00:00 Mark Jeszenka Natural Religion If there is advanced technological life elsewhere in the universe, it would unlikely be Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist. It would however certainly know the same mathematics that we do. And it would understand the phenomenon of the prime numbers and their significance as much as, perhaps more than, we do. Mathematics is the natural religion of the cosmos; and prime numbers are its central mystery. Prime numbers are those integers which can only be divided without remainder by themselves (or of course by 1). Put another way, as du Sautoy does, prime numbers are the atoms from which all other numbers are composed. 1, 2, 3, and 5 are prime. 4 is merely 2 x 2; and 6 is 2 x 3. 10 is 2 x 5. Prime numbers constitute the periodic table of mathematical elements which can be mixed and matched to form molecules and compounds of enormous size and complexity. Prime numbers become less frequent as numbers get larger. There are fewer in any interval greater than let’s say 1000, than the same interval less than 1000. This is intuitively obvious since the greater the number the more lesser numbers there that might be divided into it evenly. Interestingly, there is always at least one prime between any number and its double. The fun arises because although mathematicians know primes occur less and less frequently as we progress up the scale of numbers, no one knows how to predict when the next one will be encountered. They can be, and have been, calculated to very large numbers indeed, but they can’t be anticipated, only recognised once they appear.* Or should the term be ‘revealed’? Is it any wonder that prime numbers can take on an almost cultic significance? The 18th century philosopher, Denis Diderot, hated both religion and mathematics for the same reason. Both, he felt, provided a veil that obscured reality. Much of today’s popular aversion to mathematics may well be down to this same associative prejudice: if something isn’t immediately obvious or somewhat abstract, it is merely an unverifiable belief or theory and not worthy of respectable thought. There is a good reason for the religious, even spiritual, interpretation of mathematics - particularly number theory, and especially prime numbers. In the first instance, unlike any other area of human inquiry - even theology - the results obtained in mathematics never change. Euclid’s proofs may be superseded by more general analysis but they are nevertheless entirely correct and need no modification in a world of radically different cosmology and technology. Mathematics also shares another characteristic with religion: a concern with aesthetics. Religion orders the world. It provides comprehensibility in a world that might appear otherwise chaotic. And order is an essential component of beauty. Mathematicians not only investigate order as beauty, they collectively insist upon it in their evaluation of their work. A proof or a theorem just isn’t acceptable if it is ugly. The liturgy and art of the Roman Church has no advantage over the aesthetic wonder of the Euler Identity, which connects worlds even further apart than Heaven and Earth. And, it must be said in an era of fake news and rootless factoids, there is nothing quite so practical as a good theory. And mathematics has the best theories - in astronomy, encryption, communications, and logistics to name some of the most obvious areas that are dependent upon them. In fact understanding almost anything at all reported in the press or online demands familiarity with at least the most glaring abuses of mathematical logic. Not all of us, naturally, have the talent or discipline to become mathematicians. But most of us can appreciate the importance of history without being historians, or of engineering without building bridges. The real value of The Music of the Primes is that it inspires an appreciation of, and therefore interest in, the thought and thinkers that are perhaps the purest examples we have of shared human thought; who knows, perhaps cosmic thought. Mathematics - and its heroes like Euler, Gauss and Reimann, and Cauchy, and Godel - belong to all of humanity not just some sect. I find this inspiring. It is more than music; but music will do. *The search for ever larger prime numbers continues. Here is the latest discovery:

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-05 00:00:00 Barry Elston There’s surprisingly little maths in this book about an unsolved maths problem, only a few scattered and rather simple equations and some graphs, all of which should be understandable for non-mathematicians. And even if you don’t, you can still follow the text easily. Marcus du Sautoy works a lot with metaphors, which is frowned upon by real mathematicians, but which help to keep the layman in line. So, what’s the deal? In short: a hitherto unsolved problem in the field of number theory, the so called Riemann hypothesis, which the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann mentioned in his paper in 1859, and whose effect, if it ever turns out to be true, will make an important contribution to the understanding of prime numbers and their inner workings (those whole numbers greater than 1 that have no factors other than 1 and the number itself, staring with 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, … and of which there are infinitely many). Riemann has assumed that the zeros of a certain (admittedly rather complex) function, the Zeta-function, all lie on a certain critical line. There are an infinite number of these zeros, so one cannot simply determine and check them all with the help of a super computer, because even the most powerful computer cannot perform an infinite number of calculations in a finite time. In order to refute the hypothesis, it would be sufficient to find a single zero outside the critical line. This has been tried over the centuries, but without success: over 100 billion zeros have been checked by now (you can explore them here) and they all fit the hypothesis, but although this strongly suggests the hypothesis is true, it doesn’t count as an acceptable proof in maths. This problem is at the centre of the book. But around it the author builds up a whole cultural history of mathematics. Almost all mathematicians who dealt with prime numbers at some point and made their contributions found their rightful place here. The baton has been handed down over the centuries: Euklid, Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert, Hardy/Littlewood, Ramanujan, Gödel, Turing, to name but only a few of the best known actors. The book is filled with anecdotal stuff about all of these intriguing characters. In addition, one learns about the current state of cryptography, without which secure Internet communication would not be possible, and in which large prime numbers (100 digits and more) play an essential role. Should you read this? I would say, yes. If you’re interested in the history of maths/science in general (on the basis of a prominent example), I guess it’s hard to come by a presentation that is more simple but has the same high level of seriousness, fun, and sophistication. By the way, if it’s fame and wealth you’re after: The Riemann hypothesis belong to the list of the so called Millennium Prize Problems stated by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Solving any of these problems will get you a US$1,000,000 prize and, of course, will give you immortal fame among mathematicians. Good luck! PS. The words in this review at prime positions are underlined. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.