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Loading... Prime Obsessionby John Derbyshire
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Well that was thoroughly enjoyable; John Derbyshire’s ‘Prime Obsession’ recounts the story of the Riemann Hypothesis a piece of math that was brilliantly intuitive back in 1859 when Bernard Riemann first presented it and is still unproven despite being close to the heart of large swathes of Math and Physics. John Derbyshire kept warning me that the Math towards the end of the book would have to be taken on trust and sure enough in the last two chapters I was lost; however I did get a distinct flavor of the cooking and I felt that I knew not only something of the big picture but a great deal about the people behind the Math. There is plenty of character in this story and some excellent anecdotes, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone with solid High School Math but I suspect that the readership is self selecting and quite probably it is those with a firm math interest who will plum for this mathematically erudite (and simply erudite!) account of the prime of our mathematical lives. (  )BeesleSR | Feb 23, 2009 |   John Derbyshire has succeeded admirably in making the Riemann Hypothesis understandable to those of us who are not mathemeticians.He covers the prime number theorem and Riemann's zeta function a clear distinct fashion. ( )cmdpilot | May 22, 2008 | Easily the best of three recently published books about the Riemann Hypothesis, distinguished by its willingness to get into enough mathematical detail to give a good feel for the connection between the Riemann zeroes and the distribution of prime numbers. Readers unused to complex numbers may find some of the material heavy going, but those with a basic grounding in mathematics should be able to follow most of the material, and those whose maths includes a course in the theory of complex functions will enjoy a further reminder of the power and beauty of this fascinating branch of mathematics. My only gripe (more against the publishers than the author) is the title: to imply that Riemann, one of the greatest intuitive mathematicians of all time, was in any way "obsessive" is a cheap shot. unwinm | Sep 19, 2007 | The third, meatiest, and best of the three recent books on the Riemann Hypothesis. Just sterling. fpagan | Dec 9, 2006 | steevc | Mar 30, 2006 | 0.091 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0309085497, Hardcover)Bernhard Riemann was an underdog of sorts, a malnourished son of a parson who grew up to be the author of one of mathematics' greatest problems. In Prime Obsession, John Derbyshire deals brilliantly with both Riemann's life and that problem: proof of the conjecture, "All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half." Though the statement itself passes as nonsense to anyone but a mathematician, Derbyshire walks readers through the decades of reasoning that led to the Riemann Hypothesis in such a way as to clear it up perfectly. Riemann himself never proved the statement, and it remains unsolved to this day. Prime Obsession offers alternating chapters of step-by-step math and a history of 19th-century European intellectual life, letting readers take a breather between chunks of well-written information. Derbyshire's style is accessible but not dumbed-down, thorough but not heavy-handed. This is among the best popular treatments of an obscure mathematical idea, inviting readers to explore the theory without insisting on page after page of formulae. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who could prove the Riemann Hypothesis, but luminaries like David Hilbert, G.H. Hardy, Alan Turing, André Weil, and Freeman Dyson have all tried before. Will the Riemann Hypothesis ever be proved? "One day we shall know," writes Derbyshire, and he makes the effort seem very worthwhile. --Therese Littleton(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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