Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (Belknap Press)
*Starred Review* How did a country wracked by civil war, devastated by famine, and overshadowed by tyranny incubate a major breakthrough in modern mathematics? In the origins of descriptive set theory, Graham and Kantor (both self-described secular rationalists) confront the puzzling cultural dynamics that converted religious mysticism into mathematical insight. The authors particularly probe the surprising way that a religious heresy (Name Worshipping) emboldened the Russian mathematicians who finally surmounted the theoretical difficulties that had overwhelmed earlier pioneers in set theory. Though readers unschooled in higher mathematics may stumble over some concepts (such as denumberable subsets or the hierarchy of alephs), the authors generally succeed in translating principles into a nonspecialist’s vocabulary. Readers thus share in both the perplexities of the French rationalists defeated by the mysteries of infinite sets and the triumphs of the Russian scholars who penetrated those mysteries by deploying strategies strangely similar to devotional practices for naming the Divine. But the authors illuminate more than the psychology of a mathematical revolution; their narrative also exposes the tangle of ideological ambitions and sexual passions that transformed some brilliant researchers into treacherous tools of Soviet inquisitors and doomed others as their victims. A candid and searching analysis, restoring human drama to seemingly sterile formulas.