Mathreader's Blog

This is not just a book to read and forget, but will be the base for my research for the following years. I’m lucky enough to know the authors and with my colleagues we had a reading club where we had been reading the final drafts. We did not get far in that but it was quite rewarding. This is first class cutting edge math (with a list of open problems).

Now I have a real copy of the book in my hands, so real reading can finally begin. As a trained philosopher I start with the preface and the introduction only.  First it gives the history of semigroup theory. This may not be the full story but a well rounded, coherent one. One can argue that you don’t need history in math. False. You need the right amount, just to give the perspective, the framework to understand theorems and their applications. I’ve been working in (applied semigroup theory for the last 7 years, I knew some results, but I was lacking the vision of the field before reading this introduction.

Not surprisingly the intro summarizes the book’s main thesis (more on this later), and you also get insights how mathematics is done plus you get a good laugh (Les Monts d’Auvergne).

Clearly I am biased I believe (and working on it) that semigroup theory will have important applications in other branches of science (e.g. biology).

I’ll write many times about this book as reading goes…

Publisher’s page:

The q-theory of Finite Semigroups