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A review by nevinator
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire
Did not finish book. Stopped at 40%.
Math books are my forever my purgatory. This book does an excellent (ish) job of explaining, at the barest level, the intro knowledge to understand the question being asked about the Riemann hypothesis.
The other half is way more fascinating, the history and the mathematicians who tried to solve the theorem. The history was way more compelling, but also just scratching the surface. The book is always noting how it doesn’t have time to explain about the thing it wants to explain, at the level it expects it’s audience to be.
The high, for me, was reading about how mathematics was shaped by the politics of the Napoleonic era of Europe (you would be surprised at how often golden ages of math happen within and after major wars). The low was the writing style being to friendly, like a YouTube video essay on math with too many jokes. Though it has the blessing of being published in the 90’s, it shows how little accessible, non fiction math books have gone since than.
This is why I stopped reading
The other half is way more fascinating, the history and the mathematicians who tried to solve the theorem. The history was way more compelling, but also just scratching the surface. The book is always noting how it doesn’t have time to explain about the thing it wants to explain, at the level it expects it’s audience to be.
The high, for me, was reading about how mathematics was shaped by the politics of the Napoleonic era of Europe (you would be surprised at how often golden ages of math happen within and after major wars). The low was the writing style being to friendly, like a YouTube video essay on math with too many jokes. Though it has the blessing of being published in the 90’s, it shows how little accessible, non fiction math books have gone since than.
This is why I stopped reading