If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
I read GEB cover to cover and haven’t stopped thinking about it for years. Not a brag, a nudge that it’s not impenetrable and more people should read it.
I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a tbousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?
If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall??
More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
>there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
Which leads us to our next impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
I read GEB cover to cover and haven’t stopped thinking about it for years. Not a brag, a nudge that it’s not impenetrable and more people should read it.
GEB was one of the books that inspired me to study math in college. It made math come to life in way that my high school courses didn't.
It was required reading for my Logics class in undergrad. Pretty sure it was also on the optionals (aka required) for my Set Theory class as well.
It's also pretty typically a part of History Of Mathematics and Philosophy of Mathematics courses.
I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a tbousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?
apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that