Books: Mathematician

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY—Hermann Broch—Viking ($2.50).

Few U. S. readers, and not many critics, last year waded through a huge post-War German novel called The Sleep-Walkers. In Germany where it was widely read, its author, Hermann Broch, was known respectfully as a onetime businessman whose philosophic and scientific bent had led him to literature in middle age. Readers of The Unknown Quantity will echo that respect. The Unknown Quantity is brief (240 pages), carefully and clearly written, contrives a genuine atmosphere of intellectual excitement, but it lacks the human charm most readers demand....