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The Hilbert Challenge
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The Hilbert Challenge Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Absolutely horrible book; look elsewhere for Hilbert
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In brief, I do not recommend this book to anyone.
The book has three main problems that make it unenjoyable and quite tedious to get through.
The first problem is that the mathematical problems are not sufficiently well explained. In some cases, the problem and it's math are not explained in sufficient depth. In other cases, the problem is not clearly explained and comprehensible. In yet other cases, the problem's application or usefulness is not explained well. Finally, some math is explained so cursorily that it might as well not even have been discussed.
The second problem is that the layout of the book made very little logical sense. First, the author split the problems into various groups. Then, the author split the timeline into various sections: Pre-1900, 1900-1918, 1918-1945 and 1945-1999. He then proceeded to discuss some of the problems in each of the timelines. At each step, you've lost the entire train of thought from the previous section, and it becomes hard to understand what, if any, logical flow or consistency there was in the development of the work on Hilbert's problems or anything that lead from it.
The third and most serious issue against the book is that the author briefly introduces the "23" Hilbert problems and then subsequently expects the reader to understand what "Problem 10" is every time he refers to it, and exactly how it relates to all the other problems. There are quite a few sentences which refer to several problems by number and unless the reader is constantly referring back to the brief summary of all the problems, the sentence might as well have been in martian. After a few dozen pages of playing this "refer to the problem list" game, I became so frustrated that I just gave up and read the book.
Some minor problems include the fact that only 223 pages of the book are by the author; the rest is a translation of Hilbert's 1900 talk. (That is, less than 75% of the book is what the book is supposed to be about.) Another problem for me is that the paper is high gloss. It looks very nice at a glance, but when you try to read it, you are often faced with glare unless you orient the book perfectly with respect to the light source(s) - a problem I ordinarily face only with magazines.
Another minor problem, which may be interpreted as a positive thing by many (and I welcome that interpretation), is that the author spends a fair bit of time discussing social, governmental political and educational political aspects of countries, universities, and mathematicians. Except in a few minor cases, these things seem highly tangential to the work at hand, and although somewhat entertaining, distract from the intent of the book.
All in all, I found myself about half way through finishing it just so I could put it down and start another book, and preferably one completely unrelated to the topic. The author made such a hash of the subject that, despite finding several other interesting books on Hilbert and his problems here on Amazon, I have no interest whatsoever in reading them and actually finding out about things. |
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