Victor Blasjo's Amazon Book Reviews

Several emails have been circulated from people on my course about the possibility of a PH400 revision session. There is little indication of what exactly this might consist of, but something has been scheduled for the afternoon of June 3rd featuring Miklos and Peter. I, of course, will not be going.

One response that has just come in about this is from Victor who has suggested that we all swap notes and any other thing we have of interest. And in the spirit of this process, Victor has given us a link to a page on the Amazon website where a whole series of book reviews that he has produced are posted. 26 pages of reviews, perhaps five or six books per page - that is a prodigious amount of reviewing!

And the contents is extremely interesting. Of the people on my course, Victor is, in many ways, the most interesting of my peers. Clearly deeply fired up about the subject, he has a huge number of interesting views. I have little doubt that he could go on to a really interesting academic career, subject to controlling his tendency to dismiss in a rather off-hand manner those views that he doesn't accept.

Many of the themes we have discussed are covered in his reviews. A clear fascination with ideas of beauty in mathematics, our shared love of Kepler, and so on. It is clear that his analytical skills and critical comments are considerably above the level that I manage - clearly seen from his responses to the handful of books that I have also read.

Initially I had thought that the entire 26 pages of reviews referred to our course, but eventually I spotted that they go well back before our course into his undergraduate course (in mathematics). So he has been posting these reviews for nearly five years! Despite my slight disappointment that this was not all just this years work, I am deeply impressed with the quality of his work. Very thought provoking as I ponder on what study I am going to do over the summer.

The website link to his reviews is URL=http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2QFAEZQP8OGHX

In the spirit of Victor's gesture, I have been thinking about circulating my own revision notes - 94 pages on the themes that interested me most, plus a stack of essay plans. But not sure this is a great idea. I will ponder on it over the next few days.