18 February 2001
The Mystery of the Aleph
Amir D. Aczel

This is largely a discussion of Georg Cantor and infinite set theory. There is a brief introductory chapter on the Kabala, with some notion to link the mystical and meditative texts with the discovery of the infinite God through meditation. Meditation on the infinite, the Ein Sof of the Kabbalah, was reputed to be dangerous, and could not be safely done by everyone. The mathematical concept of infinity was extended by Cantor in the 19th century, and the author implies that this mathematician's struggles with the concept was the cause of his depression and madness. Cantor was in and out of a Nervenklinik for the last 30 years of his life, and developed an obsession that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, while studying the continuum problem, the problem of how much greater the infinity of the continuum is than the inifinity of countable numbers. The author makes much the same mystical claim to explain Kurt Godel's later madness as well, since Gödel also worked on problems of infinite dimension ( )

If you're looking for much connection to Kabbalah, you won't find it. According to Aczel, Cantor was a Frankist. However, Aczel's book is like low-hanging entertainment fruit for us nerdy types....and we like him for that. ( )

A quite readable history of the transfinite numbers. Appropriately emphasizes Georg Cantor and the Continuum Hypothesis (which claims there is no infinite cardinal between the number of integers and the number of reals). Mischievously suggests that anyone (e.g. Cantor, Gödel) who thinks too hard about the CH is bound to go mad.

As someone who finds mathematics esoteric, this was very neat and engaging. Aczel adroitly links the God of the Kabbalah, math, and everything else. ( )