by Amir D. Aczel
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Product Description
René Descartes (1596–1650) is one of the towering and central figures in Western philosophy and mathematics. His apothegm “Cogito, ergo sum” marked the birth of the mind-body problem, while his creation of so-called Cartesian coordinates have made our physical and intellectual conquest of physical space possible.
But Descartes had a mysterious and mystical side, as well. Almost certainly a member of the occult brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, he kept a secret notebook, now lost, most of which was written in code. After Descartes’s death, Gottfried Leibniz, inventor of calculus and one of the greatest mathematicians in history, moved to Paris in search of this notebook—and eventually found it in the possession of Claude Clerselier, a friend of Descartes. Leibniz called on Clerselier and was allowed to copy only a couple of pages—which, though written in code, he amazingly deciphered there on the spot. Leibniz’s hastily scribbled notes are all we have today of Descartes’s notebook, which has disappeared.
Why did Descartes keep a secret notebook, and what were its contents? The answers to these questions lead Amir Aczel and the reader on an exciting, swashbuckling journey, and offer a fascinating look at one of the great figures of Western culture.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Misleading, inaccurate, dishonest; good *fiction*, 2009-01-02
I can only corroborate what other 1-star reviewers have said. Under no circumstances read this book as a historical account of Descartes' life or adventures.
The real problem here is that there is just enough truth to make the fiction seem real. You read it, and two years later forget which tidbits about Descartes you've learned from academic resources and which pieces have attached to your memory from rubbish like this.
I hope one day the author re-writes this book replacing Descartes with a fictional character. It's a great and intriguing read - but a terribly falsity with respect to history.
I also agree with others that exists at least one fake review here.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Aczel clearly does not know what a striaghtedge is!!!!!, 2008-12-26
I am in complete agreement with the above reviewers regarding the mathematical weakness of the material presented as well as the misleading nature of the title of the book. This really was a re-hashed biography with a teaser title! My complaint, however is more fundamental. On page 31 of the book, the author has illustrations of a straightedge and a compass. The straightedge is in reality a square, which is a tool used by draftsmen and engineers. No geometer worth his or her salt would ever seriously consider using such a tool for constructions in a Euclidean setting! A straightedge is just that -- a straight edge! It has no right angle included. Furthermore, any half-serious student of Euclidean geometry knows the method for constructing a right angle using a compass and straightedge. If he just accidentally included the wrong graphic for the illustration, I could forgive this as an oversight, but just below the illustration, he states "The straightedge made angles and straight lines, while the compass was used for making circles and marking off distances." Never mind the fact that the straight edge could not be used to make lines (which are infinite in length), but only to make line segments. Such imprecision of language coupled with downright misunderstanding characterize this book. The author clearly has a flawed understanding of the whole metodology of Euclidean geometry. One never uses an imprecise tool to construct that which can be constructed with a straightedge and compass!
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Spavined Writing ,Sloppy Reasoning, Yet A Potentially Interesting Story (from Ahadada books), 2008-06-16
The very fact that the German polymath Leibniz sat down to transcribe pages of a "secret notebook" written by Rene Descartes could send chills up the spine of any fan of these superstars of the Enlightenment, and indeed that is exactly what happened to me. I was so intrigued by the title that I pre-ordered this book and waited for it to arrive in Japan with a kid on Christmas eve kind of feeling. But after I devoured it in one sitting, I found myself wondering how this mishmash of potted biographies and wobbly argumentation (Descartes was in such and such a city at the same time as such and such a reputed Rosicrucian was passing through the same city, therefore Descartes was a Rosicrucian), could add up to a book to be taken seriously. I learned that Descartes might have been poisoned, that he might have fathered a child by a mistress, that maybe he routed a boat-load of pirates all by his Popeye self, which would have made him a considerable scrapper if it were true. Leibniz comes in for an even more nebulous portrait as he glides through the pages, a mere excuse for the plot to ramble on. Finally, at the end of the book we're allowed to look over Leibniz's shoulder as he decrypts and transcribes (in record time!) an equation that would later be rediscovered by Euler, the great mathematician and associate of Gauss, the Beethoven of pure math. Yes, this is remarkable stuff, but it's really not explained in enough depth before Aczel attempts to stretch the significance of Descartes' discovery into a hyper-Einsteinian cosmological intuition of the nature of the dimensional structuring of the universe itself--a truly breathtaking, and--a truly unwarranted--leap. Add to this mix the halting, spavined style that hobbles the narrative and you have what resembles a one trick pony of a book that will leave you hoping for a Native Dancer to canter by some day.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Aczel's worst, 2007-04-17
I've enjoyed several other Aczel works: Fermat's Last Theorem, God's Equation, Mystery of the Aleph, and I struggled mightily to get through this one, but it's just too dull. Blah, blah, blah, then this clown wrote to that one and said meaningless things; blah, blah, blah, these phrases from this ancient manuscript appeared in this person's letters, proving he was influenced by it. Blech.
21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
Academic Dishonesty, 2006-10-26
It's no surprise that this book wasn't published by an academic press, because no peer review process could possibly have permitted Aczel so completely to misrepresent the contents of Descartes' `secret notebook.' When he purports to be describing the theorem Descartes discovered, Aczel is actually describing work that was done by Euler more than a century later.
One of the `Featured Reviewers' at this site says Aczel "has a talent for explaining mathematical ideas and formulas that might seem daunting to the lay reader." But how can the `lay reader,' including this reviewer, assess how good well he's explaining the material unless he is already familiar with it? Otherwise, an `expert' like Aczel can fabricate his story, the `lay reader' will never be the wiser.
In about 1750 Euler proved that if you count up the number V of vertices of a convex polyhedron, the number E of edges and the number F of faces, then V - E + F is always equal to 2. This is the theorem Aczel attributes to Descartes in the last 2 chapters of his book, a book which is otherwise just a rehash of old biographies of Descartes.
What Descartes actually proved is this: take the same convex polyhedron, calculate the angle deficiency at each vertex and sum these up - the answer is always 8 right angles (720 degrees). What's an angle deficiency? It's the sum of all the plane angles that meet at a given vertex, subtracted from 360. Let's take the octahedron as an example: at each of its vertices, four equilateral triangles meet. So the angle deficiency is [360 - (60 + 60 + 60 + 60)], which is 120 degrees. Since an octahedron has 6 identical vertices, the sum of the angle deficiencies is 6x120 = 720 degrees, or 8 right angles. The octahedron is only one particular case; this works equally well for any convex solid figure. Try it yourself for a cube, where 8x90 = 720.
Well, these two theorems are certainly very different results, but in the late 1800s, after Descartes notebook was re-discovered, people realized that you could deduce Euler's theorem from Descartes theorem. As a result, in the early 20th century some French chauvinists renamed Euler's formula for Descartes.
There is no evidence that Euler ever saw Descartes notebook, although Aczel fabricates a `fact' to make it seem like he did. There is no evidence that Euler ever visited Hanover.
Now the real facts would make a really good story for a popular math book. A real master of the genre, like William Dunham, Simon Singh or Eli Maor, would explain both Descartes' theorem and Euler's theorem to their audience and then demonstrate the logical equivalence of the two.
Aczel is apparently incapable of doing this, or at least was unwilling to do the real work that it would involve. Instead, he describes Euler's theorem where he claims to be describing Descartes' notebook. Specifically, he claims that Descartes counted the edges of a polyhedron, which he most certainly did not. Euler was the first person ever to consider the edge of a polyhedron as an item of mathematical interest, so that he actually had to coin a Latin word (acies) for it.
As is well documented in other reviews: (1) most of this book is a re-hash of various biographies of Descartes and 90% of it has nothing to do with `secret notebook,' and (2) it is absolutely loaded with factual errors about mathematics and the history of mathematics.
What's much worse is the tiny portion that does cover the notebook itself is an amazingly inaccurate and even dishonest misrepresentation of what Descartes really did. Shame, shame, shame.
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