Men of Mathematics

Rating:
Summary: Big on inspiration (for boys), short on facts
Review: Bell's book has been an inspiration to several generations of mathematicians, encouraging them to pursue the creative discipline of mathematics. For that, he has done a great service to mathematics.

Unfortunately, that is the only good thing I can say about this book. E.T. Bell was a respected Caltech mathematician, who dabbled in writing books about mathematical history. He was a great writer with style, which has led many to believe he was also an eminent scholar of history of mathematics. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bell manages to perpetrate fiction in almost every other line, mangling known facts, making unwarranted judgments and characterizations of personalities and motives. Whatever he needs to do to construct an entertaining story, he does. His name is universally cursed by historians of mathematicians.

Making up stuff for a good story might not ordinarily be bad. After all, a lot of people do it, and certainly encouraging youngsters to study mathematics is not a bad goal. But there are several ways in which this book is insidious. One is the negative potrayal of women mathematicians. As the astute reader will have noted, the title is *Men* of Mathematics. (On my paperpack edition, the word "men" is even set off by a different color than the rest of the title!) The forgiving reader may be willing to forgive this; after all, the book was written in less politically correct times, and certainly most of the famous and well-documented mathematicians are men. Gauss? A man. Euler? A man also. Etc. On the other hand, there are notable examples of great mathematicians who happened to be women. Emmy Noether and Sonja Kowalewski, for example. Women who are mentioned in Bell's book, but are either paid little attention to or treated rather badly, in a way that clearly highlights Bell's own prejudices. Some readers will be struck by sentences like "Sonja's sex had got the better of her ambitions and she had been living happily with her husband." Rather than list more examples, let me stop by adding that this kind of sentence is typical of Bell, and doesn't stand out much. What is perhaps the most revealing is that Chapter 22, "Master and Pupil", which is about Weierstrass and Kowalewski, spends undue amount of time discussing Kowalewski's sexual attributes and their effect on her mathematical colleagues and teachers, and little explaining her contributions to mathematics.

Bell also shows prejudice when he explains that the dispute between Cantor and Kronecker was due, in part, because:

"Rightly or wrongly, Cantor blamed Kronecker for his failure to obtain the coveted position at Berlin. The aggressive clannishness of Jews has often been remarked, sometimes as an argument against employing them in academic work, but it has not been so generally observed that there is no more vicious academic hatred than that of one Jew for another when they disagree on purely scientific matters or when one is jealous or afraid of another. Gentiles either laugh these hatreds off or go at them in an efficient, underhand way which often enables them to accomplish their spiteful ends under the guise of sincere friendship. When two intellectual Jews fall out they disagree all over, throw reserve to the dogs, and do everything in their power to cut one anothers' throats or stab one another in the back."

This quote was later modified (I think it might have been after Bell's death) to be about styles of academic infighting, rather than a commentary about Jews and Gentiles.

Bell typically exaggerates or just plain makes things up in order to make for a better story, but I think such a false potrayal of mathematicians cannot be good. The chapter on Galois, the most famous part of the book, is replete with historical errors and omissions, including rearranging order of events, leaving out the less savory aspects of Galois' personality, and basically saying Galois invented Galois theory the night before the duel, even though parts of his work were published and known by that time to other mathematicians.

Bell consistently paints Galois as misunderstood and his older mathematical colleagues as buffoons. This is a seductive thought to some, but the reality is that great mathematical ideas don't have to be suppressed in order to be dormant. Truly great ideas can sometimes take years to sink in. Not a romantic viewpoint perhaps, but I think Galois' greatness is enhanced, not diminished, by this realization. (Of course, Galois's inability/unwillingness to better communicate his ideas didn't help!)

This book is certainly inspirational for some, but especially for today's audience, I think it'll be glaringly biased and I doubt very inspiring for young girls in particular. The worst thing you can do is give this book to your child to read. There have been many books since then that are more accurate and less prejudiced in flavor.

Rating:
Summary: A look at mathematicians for who they really were.
Review: In this book, Bell provides the reader with an engaging look into the personal lives of many great mathematicians. While most mathematical biographies focus mainly on the individual's work, Men of Mathematics pays special attention to the lifestyles and life stories of some of the math greats. Mathematical contributions of the men are not downplayed, they are just presented in the context of their social and private lives and of the society in which they lived. For these reasons, Men of Mathematics has become one of my favorite pieces of biographical literature.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent read, for all people
Review: Men of Mathematics is one of my favorite books. These mini-biographies of the greatest mathematicians give a concise version of their lives and a pretty thorough lay description of their contributions. Dryish material in the hands of most authors, but highly dramatic stuff for Bell, a florid writer with an intense love for math and scant tolerance for other pursuits. His opinions are so firm and his reasoning so quick and sure that contemporary academic or historical writing seems tepid and mushy by comparison. The genetic source of the brilliant mathematical ability is the first order of business in the biographical formula. With the scholarly ancestor or uncle located, we move on to the educational drama, where tension is derived from the obstacles, such as idiot examiners, poetry, women, drink, that lie between the subject and mathematical greatness. Bell is outraged by the amount of time little boy William Hamilton wastes learning Oriental languages and human-calculator type parlor tricks, rather than focusing on real mathematics. The author's opinionated interpretations are not that unreasonable and his rich style is entertaining though ludicrous. In spite of the snide amusement you may derive from the language and the author's unexamined biases, his rendering of the drama behind twenty truly brilliant careers can really be quite moving. The chapter on Galois is a classic. You'll laugh; you'll cry.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent read, for all people
Review: This book is a collection of dozens of (short) biographies of mathematicians ranging from the ancient Greeks to leading 19th century mathematicians, like Cantor or Weierstrass. His writing is charming, to say the least, and he puts forth his personal opinion numerous times throughout the text. While the work contains some mathematics, it is at a level simple enough for most people to understand, and in any case, those parts can be skipped through without too much loss in content.

We learn that mathematicians really are like the rest of the world, not nerds or ivory-tower type academicians. The types of people here span the whole gamut, and as their lives were intertwined with historical events of the time, we learn a bit about general history in this book as well.

Bell's writing is also excellent. He keeps the style varied, and as his material spans almost 2500 years, the book is never boring. My personal favorites were the biographies about Galois and Abel, and as their lives were tragically cut short by lots of unlucky circumstances, Bell writes wonderfully about their lives and how mathematics touched them, and in return was blessed by them. It is perhaps Galois' story which can ring true with younger readers - like many teenagers, he was full of ambition, dreams, and hopes, but, well, he had an incredible gift for mathematics and also a whole lot of bad luck - but you'll have to read the book to see for yourself!

This book is definitely not to be missed. Although the book is long, you'll enjoy every minute of it, and also come away wiser about a group of people not many people in this world know much about.

Rating:
Summary: the lives and the math behind each mathematician
Review: This book is a wonderfully detailed account of all the men who made mathematics - from their personal biographies to the math they invented or took a step further. Definitely a classic, Bell elegantly explores the lives from birth to death of each mathematician paralleled by their proofs and conjectures.

It is also a great resource for classic proofs and their derivations. In this way, Men of Mathematics may also be read like an encyclopaedia, by turning to any page that catches your interest. Highly recommended for anyone (even 10 year olds) who show unsatiable interest in mathematics.

Rating:
Summary: A little dated, but an excellent history for math lovers.
Review: This book was published in the 1930's and therefore is not up-to-date with contemporary mathematicians.

That's OK though. Most of those who like Mathematics and particularly the writings of Lancelot Hogben and, more recently, Jan Gullberg have probably read later works anyway.

What I liked about this book is that is an easy to read history of the key men and women who developed Mathematics, going as far back as Aristotle and ending in the early part of the 20th century.

It brings out the characters that lived behind these great minds and the book almost reads like a novel, except that we can assume that it was all true. I know many people who find it hard to believe that mathematicians were actually living, breathing human beings, and actually did have other lives when they weren't preoccupied with their abacus.

A great read for math lovers and a great source of inspiration too.

Rating:
Summary: Never read this book before...so please ignore the rating.
Review: This is a classic for a number of reasons. It is a one source book of mini biographies of great mathematicians. It has been continously in print and popular since it was published about 1937. It has a vigourous prose and is amusingly, engagingly and memorably opinionated in assessing how these mathematical personalities dealt with life's vicissitudes. It probably has provided an inspiration to delve further into mathematics for many teenagers, by dramatizing the life and intellectual sojourns of mathematicians. Drama, adventure, amusement, suspense, tragedy, conflict, amazing discoveries and achievements, and writing that pulls you in. What more could you ask for? If you know a teenager interested in maths or sciences, this is a good bet.

The book is such an enduring icon in popular mathematical books, who was E T Bell? He was an Englishman transplanted to California who was a professor of mathematics, and wrote, under a pseudonym, some successful science fiction. In 1993, a biography of E T Bell written by Constance Reid, called The search for E.T. Bell :also known as John Taine, was published. Constance Reid is famous as the biographer of the great mathematicians David Hilbert, and Hilbert's student, Richard Courant. Interesting guy.

Rating:
Summary: A must-read for math lovers!
Review: This is a superbly written collection of biographies. Mr. Bell was obviously a great writer--his ability shows in how he brings each mathematician to life, as well as in his witty sense of sarcasm. Each chapter is dedicated mainly to the life and career of the mathematician in question, and to a lesser extent to the substance of his mathematical work.

I decided to give the book four stars instead of five because I felt that it tackled too much in too little space. Not having any mathematical education beyond high school calculus (which I've completely forgotten), I found it very difficult at times to follow the technical discussions, despite Mr. Bell's assurance to the contrary in the Introduction. This is most likely, however, not something that the author could have remedied with a clearer explanation--let's face it, squeezing a mathematical genius's life work into three pages that a non-mathematician can (almost) comprehend is quite a challenge.

Overall, this book is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in mathematics and/or the sciences in general--keeping in mind, of course, that the focus of the book is the lives of great mathematicians and not an in-depth study of their work.

Rating:
Summary: A must-read for math lovers!
Review: This is a superbly written collection of biographies. Mr. Bell was obviously a great writer--his ability shows in how he brings each mathematician to life, as well as in his witty sense of sarcasm. Each chapter is dedicated mainly to the life and career of the mathematician in question, and to a lesser extent to the substance of his mathematical work.

I decided to give the book four stars instead of five because I felt that it tackled too much in too little space. Not having any mathematical education beyond high school calculus (which I've completely forgotten), I found it very difficult at times to follow the technical discussions, despite Mr. Bell's assurance to the contrary in the Introduction. This is most likely, however, not something that the author could have remedied with a clearer explanation--let's face it, squeezing a mathematical genius's life work into three pages that a non-mathematician can (almost) comprehend is quite a challenge.

Overall, this book is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in mathematics and/or the sciences in general--keeping in mind, of course, that the focus of the book is the lives of great mathematicians and not an in-depth study of their work.

Rating:
Summary: Big on inspiration (for boys), short on facts
Review: This is unlikely to be a review that will garner much praise from fans of the book, but it is an honest one.

Bell's book has been an inspiration to several generations of mathematicians, encouraging them to pursue the creative discipline of mathematics. For that, he has done a great service to mathematics.

Unfortunately, that is the only good thing I can say about this book. E.T. Bell was a respected Caltech mathematician, who dabbled in writing books about mathematical history. He was a great writer with style, which has led many to believe he was also an eminent scholar of history of mathematics. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bell manages to perpetrate fiction in almost every other line, mangling known facts, making unwarranted judgments and characterizations of personalities and motives. Whatever he needs to do to construct an entertaining story, he does. His name is universally cursed by historians of mathematicians.

Making up stuff for a good story might not ordinarily be bad. After all, a lot of people do it, and certainly encouraging youngsters to study mathematics is not a bad goal. But there are several ways in which this book is insidious. One is the negative potrayal of women mathematicians. As the astute reader will have noted, the title is *Men* of Mathematics. (On my paperpack edition, the word "men" is even set off by a different color than the rest of the title!) The forgiving reader may be willing to forgive this; after all, the book was written in less politically correct times, and certainly most of the famous and well-documented mathematicians are men. Gauss? A man. Euler? A man also. Etc. On the other hand, there are notable examples of great mathematicians who happened to be women. Emmy Noether and Sonja Kowalewski, for example. Women who are mentioned in Bell's book, but are either paid little attention to or treated rather badly, in a way that clearly highlights Bell's own prejudices. Some readers will be struck by sentences like "Sonja's sex had got the better of her ambitions and she had been living happily with her husband." Rather than list more examples, let me stop by adding that this kind of sentence is typical of Bell, and doesn't stand out much. What is perhaps the most revealing is that Chapter 22, "Master and Pupil", which is about Weierstrass and Kowalewski, spends undue amount of time discussing Kowalewski's sexual attributes and their effect on her mathematical colleagues and teachers, and little explaining her contributions to mathematics.

Bell also shows prejudice when he explains that the dispute between Cantor and Kronecker was due, in part, because:

"Rightly or wrongly, Cantor blamed Kronecker for his failure to obtain the coveted position at Berlin. The aggressive clannishness of Jews has often been remarked, sometimes as an argument against employing them in academic work, but it has not been so generally observed that there is no more vicious academic hatred than that of one Jew for another when they disagree on purely scientific matters or when one is jealous or afraid of another. Gentiles either laugh these hatreds off or go at them in an efficient, underhand way which often enables them to accomplish their spiteful ends under the guise of sincere friendship. When two intellectual Jews fall out they disagree all over, throw reserve to the dogs, and do everything in their power to cut one anothers' throats or stab one another in the back."

This quote was later modified (I think it might have been after Bell's death) to be about styles of academic infighting, rather than a commentary about Jews and Gentiles.

Bell typically exaggerates or just plain makes things up in order to make mathematicians look more bizarre than they really are. As I've said, this makes for a good story, but I think such a false negative potrayal of mathematicians cannot be good.

Many people have also relied on this book, because of its fame, as one of their few sources of mathematical history and biography. This includes mathematicians. I feel that getting the historical facts wrong oftentimes gives these mathematicians a distorted view of their subject and helps perpetrates certain myths of the mathematical culture.

This book is certainly inspirational for some, but especially for today's audience, I think it'll be glaringly biased and I doubt very inspiring for young girls in particular. The worst thing you can do is give this book to your child to read. There have been many books since then that are more accurate and less prejudiced in flavor.