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My email signature includes the quotation, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." What a conversation stopper! Not only do I make the universal claim that God exists (and is personal enough to have thoughts), but the dread mathematical term "equation" is the second word. Surely in this postmodern era I would have enough sense to avoid such a faux pas.

In my defense, the last decade has actually brought a renewed interest in math. John Allen Paulos' book highlighting the "innumeracy" of most adults have been in print for quite a while now, and "holistic" methods of teaching secondary mathematics have aroused no end of controversy among parents and teachers, particularly in California. Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's notorious "Last Theorem" (after 300 years) is old news now. Just within the last year, director Ron Howard earned multiple Oscars for his portrayal of the mentally disturbed Nobel Prize-winner John Nash (A Beautiful Mind) and a playwright earned the Tony for Best Play by wrapping a story about family around a putative proof of a famous conjecture (Proof). Christian thought seems a little behind; the few examples include the dubious Bible Code and the more rigorous probabilistic design arguments of Bill Dembski.

Not that this should surprise anyone. Ever since Laplace told Napoleon (perhaps apocryphally), when asked where God was in his equations, "Sir, I had no need of that hypothesis," math has edged away from connections to the Almighty. More and more mathematicians (not to mention philosophers of math) at least pay lip service to one of two notions; either that math is a mere convenient formalism (approximately modernist), or that it is a plastic societal agreement (more or less postmodernist).

Which iconoclast gave me my quote, then? It was Srinivasa Ramanujan, a brilliant Indian mathematician who flourished around World War I and died tragically young. Unfortunately for my quote, Ramanujan also claimed that some of his formulas were given to him in dreams by a minor member of the Hindu pantheon. Should I relent in my quest to be a truly Christian mathematician?

Yet there are Christian mathematicians; in fact, an Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences has been active for over two decades. Now Eerdmans has published the collaborative effort of ten of their members addressing the nature of math, the increasing role of mathematics in culture, and many practical contemporary issues. This book, Mathematics in a Postmodern Age: A Christian Perspective (hereafter MPA), brings specifically Christian thought together with informed historical and recent knowledge.

Editors Russell W. Howell and W. James  Bradley and the other contributors come to the table with several key shared principles that inform the whole work. First, they assert that our capacity for mathematics is good, as it is created by God, yet they also acknowledge that all our abilities are tainted by the Fall. Out of gratitude for God's gift of redemption, they want to discern God's purposes for math activity; indeed, both in discovering eternal truths and in helping measure and steward the earth, math is part of humanity's creation directive. Within this (rather Reformed) framework, the three main parts of the book treat philosophical issues in the nature of math, math's influence in science and culture, and issue-oriented case studies in mathematics.

The first section emphasizes why many of us study and teach math in the first place. It is true, universal, shows God's order, is challenging, and so on. The first chapter describes the main philosophies of math, but following chapters mold these views in distinctly Christian ways to understand both in what (rigorous, philosophical) sense math can be considered to be in the mind of God (chapter 3) and how to acknowledge the pragmatic component of math (chapter 4).. The latter will be very challenging to any true child of modernity; we find it difficult to admit that effort might have a role in what theorems are considered 'true' by our limited human reason.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47