Review of Euclid ’ s Windows 3 History and Biography

This is a shallow book on deep matters, about which the author knows next to nothing. The concept of the book is appealing: a popular review of geometrical notions from Euclid to Einstein as background to contemporary string theory with comments on the related intellectual history and portraits of some principal figures: Descartes, Gauss, Riemann and Einstein. Unfortunately the author is indifferent to mathematics, has only approximate notions of European history, and no curiosity about individuals. Famous names serve only as tags for the cardboard figures that he paints. Disoriented by ideas and by individuals whose feelings and behavior are not those of late twentieth-century America, he attempts to hide his confusion by an incessant, sometimes tasteless, facetiousness, almost a nervous tick with him, by railing at or mocking his pretended dolts or villains, Kant, Gauss’s father or Kronecker, or by maudlin attempts to turn his heros into victims. There would be little point in reviewing the book, were it not that the germ of an excellent monograph is there that, in competent and sensitive hands, could have been read with pleasure and profit by students, mature mathematicians, and curious laymen. As a member of the second group who knows scarcely more than the author about the material, I certainly found it an occasion to reflect onwhat I would have liked to learn from the book and, indeed, an occasion to discover more about the topics discussed, not from the book itself, but from more reliable sources.