This is my third book by Aczel, preceded (in reading order) by The Riddle of the Compass and Pendulum. I found this one to be the weakest of the three, which is odd since Aczel has multiple degrees in mathematics and has lectured on the subject at several top universities.

Mystery of the Aleph traces the concept of infinity from its first stirrings in Greek antiquity, through early efforts at defining it both as a mathematical concept and as a metaphor for God (the Kabbalah connection), and into the life of Georg Cantor and his successors who turned the study of infinity into a concrete mathematical exercise.

I think that perhaps Aczel, being a mathematician, was too close to the subject matter and I found many of the mathematical explanations a bit sparse. I also did not care for the over-emphasis on the descent into madness of both Cantor and Gödel while working on transfinite set theory. It reminded me of similar stories surrounding thermodynamics and the depression of Boltzmann and others. Repeat after me: sometimes people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or other mental illnesses have jobs in math or science, but the study of hard or esoteric math problems does not cause or trigger mental illness. ( )

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. ( )