sick

I finished Anathem. It took me a few days, but cut me some slack; it's just shy of 1000 pages, and I didn't get a good start on it until Friday afternoon.

The simplest way I can explain it is that it's a work of speculative fiction whose main theme is Platonism. That is, in the philosophy of mathematics, the school of thought which holds that mathematical entities exist independent of the human mind; they are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging.

It's the view held by the majority of actual mathematicians, including me.

It can be contrasted with the philosophies of my arch-enemies, social constructivism and social realism, which hold that mathematics is simply a social construct, a sort of game we play in our heads with symbols and numbers and the rest. Typically the people who believe such things aren't actually mathematicians. They're sociologists and other dreadful things.

Anyway, I'll get off the philosophical rant.

It's a good book if you're the sort of person who's interested in that sort of thing, which I am. I recommend it highly. I may be biased, however.