Avner Ash

I understood it up to chapter 12, and found that fascinating. After that I gradually lost the plot until it had vanished completely at chapter 19. I skim-read the book after that. I really liked the infectious way the authors explain the "amazing" concepts, but found it annoying in the latter tough stages of the book that they would slip in a explanation of something trivial amongst the advanced maths.

As a high school student, I found that this book struck an admirable balance between explaining in detail the simple concepts and explaining in essence the sweep of grand theorems. I will likely reread parts of this book for gems to contemplate.

Enjoyable, technical treatment of a fragment of modern number theory involving group representations, Galois theory, elliptic curves, reciprocity laws, and other esoterica that went into the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. "Popular"-level, but by three-quarters of the way through I had reached conceptuo-abstractional overload.

Pure mathematics: Centered on properties of "elliptic" curves described by equations of the form y^2 = x^3 + Ax + B. Aimed at inculcating an understanding of the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, one of the unsolved Millennium Problems with a million-dollar prize. Challenging but not altogether impenetrable for readers who are not professional mathematicians, as long as they are comfortable with algebra and calculus.