(no subject)

Today's snark in mathematics reviews comes to you from Eli Rabett discussing Robert Langlands's review of Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace; it begins This is a shallow book on deep matters, about which the author knows next to nothing, but that is not why I wished to post about it.

No, I wished to remark on the single sentence

String theory itself or, better and more broadly, the conceptual apparatus of much of modern theoretical physics, above all of relativity theory, statistical physics and quantum field theory, whether in its original form as quantum electrodynamics, or as the basis of the standard theory of weak and strong interactions, or as string theory, is mathematics, or seems to be, although often not mathematics of a kind with which those with a traditional training are very comfortable.

Finally I have found a man who likes to string sentences together even more than I do. Entertainingly, Dr. Langlands is also Canadian.

But if it's pure snark you're after, this review has it in spades. From

To isolate these five developments [Euclid's plane geometry, Decartes's coordinate system, non-Euclidian geometries, higher-dimensional geometry, general relativity], each a major moment in intellectual history, as the themes of a single essay on mathematics was brilliant; to realize the concept an enormous challenge, beyond me, beyond most readers of the Notices, and certainly far beyond the author, locked in the present, upon which for him all windows open, and dazzled by his own flippancy.

or

Mlodinow's book is short, and the space is largely taken up with material that is irrelevant or false, and often both.

or even

[Regarding Cartesian analytic geometry] He would of course have first to read Descartes, but there is no sign that Mlodinow regarded that as appropriate preparation.