8 /10 1 Votes
Publisher Birkhäuser Media type Print ISBN 978-3-7643-3034-7 Subject Mathematics | 4/5 Goodreads Publication date 1982 Pages 342 Originally published 1982 Page count 342 OCLC 8113006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Works by Rudy Rucker, Mathematics books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite is a theoretical mathematics book by American mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker.
Contents
Marketing
The dust jacket of the original (Birkhäuser) edition had a picture of a star over a mountain and appeared to be a religious or mystical work. Subsequent paperback reprintings had covers suggesting that the publishers wished to appeal to a "new age" market. The most recent editions, from Princeton University Press, have very austere covers suggesting an academic work.
Synopsis
The book contains accessible popular expositions on the mathematical theory of infinity, and a number of related topics. These include Gödel's incompleteness theorems and their relationship to concepts of artificial intelligence and the human mind, as well as the conceivability of some unconventional cosmological models. The material is approached from a variety of viewpoints, some more conventionally mathematical and others being nearly mystical. There is a brief account of the author's personal contact with Kurt Gödel.
An appendix contains one of the few popular expositions on set theory research on what are known as "strong axioms of infinity."