Religious mystics have a long history of borrowing from mathematics. It is less common for mathematicians to draw on religion. In Naming Infinity, historian of science Loren Graham and mathematician Jean-Michel Kan-tor argue that an esoteric Christian sect contributed to advances in set theory in Russia in the first decades of the twentieth century. In pursuing their claim, they reveal a much larger drama: the flourishing of mathematics under the repression of the early Soviet regime. Graham and Kantor begin in 1913, when the Imperial Russian Navy stormed a monastery on a Greek peninsula where a sect of Russian Orthodox monks had fled to pursue a mystical practice known as name worshipping. Holding the heretical view that God comes into existence when named, these monks believed that repeating the name of Jesus while controlling their breath and heartbeat would bring them closer to the infinite.
展开▼
