A brief history of infinity

Paolo Zellini

Why I looked at this book

Ideas of infinity have long been something that thinkers have liked to speculate about. But infinity holds many paradoxes, and allowing such ideas into mainstream thought has been a slow process. I'm hoping that this book will tell me about this process, as well as showing areas where paradoxes are still a problem. I found Rudy Rucker's book Infinity and the mind (describing some of the more recent ideas about infinity) very thought provoking. Will Zellini's book be equally thought provoking - I look forward to finding out.

First impressions

This is a short book so the sample is only a few pages, but they do contain some interesting ideas. Zellini tells of how ancient thinkers had ambivalent feelings about the infinite - on the one hand it was equated with a creator or source of becoming, on the other hand it was seen as an area of danger and chaos. I hope the rest of the book is equally interesting.