Book Report: A Strange Wilderness

This afternoon, I thought back on wrong career decisions I've made. I thought about their consequences—totally overshadowed by consequences of things out of my control. It's like the lives of famous mathematicians; they did cool math, but that isn't necessarily the most interesting thing that happened near them.

So A Strange Wilderness is an interesting read. It's a collection of short biographies of many mathematicians. It has the math (well it has some of the math, and tells you enough so that you can look up the rest) but mostly it has the interesting things. Some stuff I already knew; some I didn't. I was pretty happy for the section on the Bourbaki group; up until now, I'd found short descriptions, but nothing that gave an idea of what they did.