skopia
Gamow carries a reader from counting to infinity, from atoms to the expanding universe, drawing every illustration himself. The psychologist Steven Pinker traces his science writing to reading this as a boy.
Set theory, Badiou insists, is the only language that can say what being is. Truth erupts as an event in politics, art, science, or love, and a subject is whoever stays faithful.
How does a self arise from parts that have none? Hofstadter answers by braiding Godel's proof that no system can prove all its truths with Escher's staircases and Bach's canons into strange loops.
Five assumptions about points and lines, and from them Euclid derives hundreds of theorems, up to the proof that the primes never run out. You finish knowing what a proof is.