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This bad guy has a gang, the logical positivists, who aren’t really his gang but Wittgenstein “fulminates,” “banishes,” “devastates,” “rages,” and “bewitches” them into delusional discipleship. Then, because every good guy needs a bad guy, we meet Ludwig Wittgenstein with his bad idea, linguistic relativism. In Incompleteness we meet her good guy, Kurt Gödel, with his good idea, mathematical Platonism. Incompleteness spins an engaging yarn introducing a few of the main players who’ve struggled with the philosophical implications of Gödel’s work over the past seventy-five years

And Rebecca Goldstein is a great storyteller. I agree with Rebecca Goldstein: the importance of Gödel’s work on incompleteness of formal systems reverberates so broadly beyond the narrow confines of academic mathematics that someone’s got to risk blurring the ideas a little by styling a narrative that welcomes the non-specialist reader with a great story.

Too many and the interested non-specialist reader puts your book back on the shelf having failed the flip-through test for readability. The impossible dilemma of writing popular mathematics: How many equations to use? Too few and the language is insufficient to the subtlety of the ideas.