Juan Redin Miqueleiz 2008-08-05

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

It covers the matter superbly. It is amazing that such an intricate topic can be covered with such ease. It is worth reading...

Gajanan Bhat 2007-09-03

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

I recently got a chance to read this book, and I have been really impressed with this one. The author starts off with a joke that was played on mathematicians, and he goes back and forth in time explaining different concepts and linking together works of different mathematicians. One of the best things I liked about the primes that he mentioned were the relation that they had to energy levels of electrons in quantum physics. I was blown over by this thought that an idea that was so rooted in math actually had a link to stuff in the real world.
A must read for everyone. Its not highly mathematical, and even a layman would understand it.

Jaume Puigbo Vila 2007-06-05

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

This is a fantastic history book on the efforts of some of the greatest mathematical (and physicist's )minds from Gauss and Riemann to Selberg and Alain Connes in their efforts to crack one of the most beautiful problems: the distribution of prime numbers.

Some of the greatest insights in mathematics and in science are when somebody makes an unexpected link between two different areas. This is what the genius of Riemann suggested connecting the prime numbers to the zeroes of a function of complex variable. The conjectured location of the zeroes of this function, the Riemann Hypothesis, is the only unsolved problems of Hilbert's list and has become, with all the honours, one of the Millenium problems, worth one million dollars, but that is nothing compared to the instant glory acquired by whoever can solve it.

Unlike the other famous problem, Fermat's Last Theorem, many theorems depend on the Hypothesis.

The book reads like a thriller and indeed some of the anecdotes are those of thriller, like the mysteries still contained in the remaining unpublished papers of Riemann, the Nachlass, and the disappearance of one of his notebooks and the destruction of a large number of his notes by his housekeeper. Another example is André Weil being accused of espionage in Finland for writing mathematical letters to Russian colleagues, being condemned to death and being spared of the death sentence by a chance dinner of the Police Chief with Nevalinna (a Finish mathematician) the night before the execution.

Billions of zeroes are known to be in the critical line and even we know that a high percentage are there, but we cannot prove with absolute certainty that they are all there. And, as Littlewood, showed, great empirical evidence is not a guarantee of mathematical certainty.

It was interesting to learn that there is a formula that outputs (when the value is positive) all primes and only primes.

This is a highly recommended book for all people interested in mathematics, although some college level of this subject will make it easier to digest.

Shlomo Yona 2007-03-18

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

I'd describe the book first as a novel, then as a history book and will not describe it at all as a mathematics book. It does, nonetheless, links nicely the thread that links several important works in mathematics.

Too many metaphors for my taste. Also, too many repetitions on information that was already mentioned in previous pages.

The book gave me a nice overview of the last two centuries viewed through the linking thread "The Riemann Hypothesis", introduces some interesting problems, some of which I learned in my undergraduate studies, and some were new to me. I liked the list of references for "extra reading" given by the author.

Nice book, too much of a "novel" for my taste. I like my math formal and my history with more facts than metaphors, but I'm not sure that my taste is the kind that makes books like this sell... :-)

Bottom line: nice read. I read it in a weekend and the Hebrew version (with a very good, in my opinion, translation by Uriel Givon, who added some extra information in the footnotes).

Brian Michalowski 2006-05-18

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

Mathematical texts are seldom page-turners, but du Sautoy has written a book that's difficult to put down. He describes the history of the Riemann Hypothesis as an unfolding mystery, and there are genuine cliffhangers that leave you wondering what twists and turns the plot is about to take.

My favorite part of the book, though, consists of the characters. Instead of dryly listing each mathematician's achievement, du Sautoy describes their personalities and quirks. If you have a background in math, you'll have heard of most of the mathematicians in this book, but perhaps not known which were womanizers, which were rivals with each other, and which were just plain nuts. I'd wager that this is the first math text ever written to start with the description of an April Fool's prank.

This plot and character development means there's not as much space for technical explanations as one might like, and du Sautoy consistently avoids technical details to emphasize the ideas behind them instead. For me this was fine, since it's given me the motivation to read a more technical book, but folks who are interested only in the math behind the Riemann Hypothesis and nothing more would be happier selecting another text.