Hilbert Paperback – April 19, 1996

This work touches the heart and informs the mind. Maybe the best biography I have read. Hilbert the fascinating mathematican combined with a marvelous writer. Great!Reid connects three themes to the melody of Hilbert's life - the people, the environment and, most of all, the mathematics. Minkowski, Klein, Hurwitz, Weyl, Courant, Born, Siegel, Noether, Sommerfeld and many more are not just mentioned, but come to life.The ambience of Königsberg, Göttingen and the changing German world are carefully done. Best of all, the mathematical ideas that drove Hilbert play the central role in the story. Outstanding explaination of mathematical issues for non mathematicans.Reid provides excerpts from letters. One example is Minkowski writing to Hilbert after his sisters death: "It seems that through a preoccupation with science, we acquire firmer hold on the vicissitudes of life and meet them with greater calm, but in reality we have done no more than find a way to escape from our sorrows." (55) Many of Minkowski's letters are used, providing insight into Hilbert's friendship and a window into Minkowski's life.The mathematics that consumed Hilbert are explained in an accessible way. Reid focuses on the effect on Hilbert and the community, not on the technical problems. For instance, Weyl's reaction as a young student in Göttingen: "Hilbert's optimism, his spiritual passion, his unshakable faith in the supreme value of science, and his firm confidence in the power of reason. . . . Weyl heard the sweet flute of the Peid Piper seducing so many rats to follow him into the deep river of mathematics." (94) Born remembers his arrival in Göttingen and meeting Hilbert and Minkowski: "The conversation of the two friends was an intellectual fireworks display." (95)Hilbert's efforts to connect mathematics and philosophy is an important part of the book. "Just before the war Bertrand Russell, with A. N. Whitehead, had published his Principia Mathematica. Hilbert was convinced that the combination of mathematics, philosophy and logic represented by Russel should play a greater role in science." (144)Reid reproduces several key speeches of Hilbert. She includes enough help to make them accessible to a general audience. One was his speech at his home town, Königsberg in 1930. "Thus it happens that our present culture, insofar as it is concerned with the intellectual understanding and conquest of nature, rests upon mathematics!" (195) Mathematics as Truth. He concludes: "Comte could not find an unsolvable problem lies in the fact that there is no such thing as an unsolvable problem. . . . His last words into the microphone were firm and strong: 'Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen'. We must know. We will know." (196) Real, deep, complete, overriding faith in mathematical science. Gödel was next.In 1962 Richard Courant gave tribute to Hilbert in Göttingen. "Although mathematics has played an important role for more than two thousand years, it is still subject to changes of fashion and, above all, to departures from tradition. In the present era of the over-active industrialization of science, propaganda, and the explosive manipulation of the social and personal basis of science, I believe we find ourselves in such a period of danger." (220) Five decades have passed. Warning seems accurate.Mathematical formulas play no significant part of this work. However, the philosophical foundation of mathematics, and the connection of mathematics to science and the world does appear. Intriguing and thought provoking!

About as well done and accessible a bio of a top-tier mathematician as one is likely to come across. Ms. Reid manages to convey the flavor of the times as well as the personalities of several other notables with whom David Hilbert either taught or counted among his friends. Lots to chew on here for those with advanced math's in their CV -- especially in the lengthy appended obituary which contains more formalisms than does the body of the work. Not light reading by any means ... but seldom labor intensive either.

A wonderful book and a sensitive portrait of one of the greatest and most versatile mathematicians in history who was also a great human being. The book is as much a paean to the romantic mathematical life as anything else. From his perch in Göttingen, Hilbert took German mathematics to great heights until it was brought crashing down by politics and Nazism. His finest hour came in World War 1 when he and Einstein refused to sign a shameful, jingoistic manifesto claiming Germany as the victim rather than the instigator of aggression; both Einstein and Hilbert were vilified as traitors for this.In 1900 Hilbert set out 23 unsolved problems that would keep mathematicians busy for the next hundred years. He was obsessed with the formalization of all of math and physics, a dream that was shattered in 1931 by Kurt Gödel through his incompleteness theorems. This book again raises the question of how extreme intellectual achievement and extreme militarism can co-exist in the same country.

A long time ago I had a copy of "Geometry and Imagination". It was a book that stoked my interest in math even though I never got through it. Hilbert was one of the mathematicians who opened up the field in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. What's best about the book is that it really isn't about math per se - although the author names the various discoveries that Hilbert is tied to. It's about the people around him and how he developed his school. An excellent story of a remarkable man and his times.

Great book. Required reading for a graduate math course. Explained Hilbert's life, in a conversational manner.Those with little or no math background may have a tough time.

The book did not come in a blue cover as advertised.It came as second hand..I did not order second hand thing

It is a very nice description of the life a mathematician from a person not from a mathematics background.

A very interesting read