About the Author:
Amir D. Aczel earned both his B.A. in mathematics and master of sciences degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. He is a professor at Bentley College in Waltham, MA. Among other books, he is the author of Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market ,and Just About Everything Else (2004); Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics (2002, paperback to Plume, UK to John Wiley, Canadian to Raincoast); The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity (2000; U.K. and U.S. paperback to Simon & Schuster); God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity and the Expanding Universe (1999; paperback to Dell); and Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem (1996; paperback to Dell). His work has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Turkish, Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and Finnish.
From Publishers Weekly:
Lay readers interested in mathematical history will learn a lot they didn't know from Aczel's latest book, which focuses on a group of French mathematicians who in the 1930s decided to publish their collective work under an imaginary name. But readers may also get the feeling that this able math and science popularizer is running out of suitable topics. It's not that the contributions of the Bourbaki school weren't important—their rigorous approach to proofs and emphasis on set theory provided the basis for what became known as the New Math—it's just that this curious story isn't as inherently dramatic as, say, that of Andrew Wiles's solving Fermat's Last Theorem. Aczel surveys with his usual panache the careers of some major members of the group, like the eccentric Alexandre Grothendieck, who in 1991 became a hermit in the Pyrenees, but Aczel is less convincing when he draws simplistic parallels between advances in mathematics and modern art. While always readable, this diffuse narrative (including chapters on Bourbaki's influence on anthropology and linguistics) strains to pull its disparate parts into a satisfactory whole. (Oct. 10)
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