Negative Positive
Title: Too difficult
Review: For trying to be a popular exposition on mathematics Devlin's book is too difficult for the lay reader. Unless you have university level mathematics in your luggage you won't understand much. The explanations of basic conepts are missing, the proofs are not there and the history is condensed into a few pages. Thus if your mathematical imagination cannot fill in these gaps you will not extract much pleasure from this book. You will rather be frustrated. I myself have read mathematics at the university and still couldn't follow him everywhere. The problem is that the labeling of the book is misleading. This is not a book of popularized mathematics. This is leizure time reading for mathematics professors and math-freaks. If you want to read something that is easy to understand but still interesting try some of the American Mathematical Society's wonderful publications (you can find them all on amazon).
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