The Art of Logic

a book that will make you love the math classes you won't understood in school.

Friendly, fun writing.

Any attempt to bridge the purely logical behaving world of constructed logical systems and the illogical real world is always a courageous one. Eugenia Cheng chooses her examples from real life situations and tries to show how pure mathematics is actually relevant to life. That explains why some readers are not happy with her social and political observations. But she warns the reader at the very beginning that this book was an attempt to think about a world that is not logical, in a logical way, as if it behaves logically.I found the book helpful in showing how the objects of mathematics are not only numbers and functions but also patterns. The idea to abstract a pattern from a real life situation and perfecting it by simply omitting its illogical parts, and then transferring and applying it to other real life situations is a mind opening one.

If you are like me and are tired of the current round of political divisiveness where politicians refute arguments by shouting "fake news" then this book is for you. I could write more but cannot be more clear than the book' first paragraph. Introduction: WOULDN’T IT BE HELPFUL if everyone were able to think more clearly? To tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and lies? But what is truth? Is the difference between “truth” and “untruth” always that simple? In fact, is it ever that simple? If it is, why do people disagree with each other so much? And if it isn’t, why do people ever agree with each other at all? The world is awash with terrible arguments, conflict, divisiveness, fake news, victimhood, exploitation, prejudice, bigotry, blame, shouting, and miniscule attention spans. When cat memes attract more attention than murders, is logic dead? When a headline goes viral regardless of its veracity, has rationality become futile? Too often, people make simple and dramatic statements for effect, impact, acclaim, and to try and grab some limelight in a world where endless sources are competing relentlessly for our attention all the time. But the excessive simplifications push us into fabricated black and white situations when everything is really in infinite shades of gray and indeed multi-colors. Hence we seem to live with a constant background noise of vitriol, disagreement, and tribes of people attacking other tribes, figuratively if not for real. Is all hope lost? Are we doomed to take sides, be stuck in echo chambers, never agree again? No. There is a lifebelt available to anyone drowning in the illogic of the modern world, and that lifebelt is logic. But like any lifebelt, it will only help us if we use it well. This means not only understanding logic better, but also understanding emotions better and, most importantly, the interaction between them.

This was far more digestible than some of the authors other material, of which is extremely relevant if not a bit beyond my scope - but this one here is great. A must read!

The book has arrived fast and with no damage.