Exact Thinking In Demented Times
A wonderful and thorough history of the intersecting philosophical and mathematical circles in Vienna from the early 1920s to their end in Austrian Fascism and the Anschluss. Sigmund offers sensitive and intelligent portrayals of the most notable participants (though he rather neglect John von Neumann) as well as those who, like the note-taking Dr. Rose Rand, were ill-treated in life and neglected afterward. This deserves special praise because, in this broad group biography, few of the characters are easy to identify with. Sigmund is equally at home with the ideas with which these circles wrestled, and if he occasionally despairs of explaining set theory to a general audience, his effort to explain Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem by way of Sudoko is both clever and effective.