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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
A truly magnificent rendering of the most abstract ideas in a way that the layman can understand. Contains the most straightforward description of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that I have yet encountered.
Very accessible account of Andrew Wile's successful attack and subjugation of Fermat's Last Theorem. Incredibly interesting and well-written.
informative
medium-paced
Awesome reading! Makes everyone fall in love with Math!
Moderately thorough history of how Fermat's Last Theorem was solved by Fermat. Provided good appendices to supplement the math involved. It makes want to take on a challenge...maybe not quite this involved, but it's inspirational nonetheless.
A great book outlining not the way Fermat’s conjecture was proven. But the author went into the history from ancient Greece to the modern era on the journey that lead to the proofs of Taniyama-Shimura conjecture and by inference Fermat’s conjecture.
The book illustrated the amazing mind and talent of Andrew Wiles and how by chance he was in a cosmic karmic path that made him one of the few people in the world which could accomplish this world changing discovery. By his works there is a grand set of tools namely Taniyama-Shimura and by Wiles and Richard Taylor’s work also formalized missing parts of the Kolyvagin-Flach method. Mathematicians and the world will benefit from these great mathematical discovery in unrealized and undreamed of applications for thousands of years.
The book illustrated the amazing mind and talent of Andrew Wiles and how by chance he was in a cosmic karmic path that made him one of the few people in the world which could accomplish this world changing discovery. By his works there is a grand set of tools namely Taniyama-Shimura and by Wiles and Richard Taylor’s work also formalized missing parts of the Kolyvagin-Flach method. Mathematicians and the world will benefit from these great mathematical discovery in unrealized and undreamed of applications for thousands of years.
informative
slow-paced
Anyone who knows me well knows that I have some longstanding issues with maths; namely that I am awful at them, fall prey to a number of silly arithmetic mistakes that topple my every attempt at them, and have a hard time thinking abstractly enough to grasp some of their most fundamental concepts.
This book has undone all of that in one fell swoop that had me staying up late, hesitant to stop reading and eager to learn more.
Simon Singh weaves a fantastically accessible tale of history, tragedy, intellectual conquest, and the triumphs of the human mind. And, of course, pure maths. He thoroughly explains a number of challenging mathematical concepts and proofs that could easily baffle non-mathematicians, softening them in just the right ways without oversimplifying. Never once does he condescend or patronize, and it's clear that he expects his readers to do a bit of work to follow along; for me, a sort of math-phobic, this book presented the perfect blend of clarification and challenge, the sort of exploration I've come to expect from my best graduate-level lecturers in my own field.
Not only did I learn a lot of history and a remarkable amount of maths (the appendix offers some proofs for the reader to work through, in addition to the main text, and I'm happy to say I was able to work them out with Singh's helpful elucidation), I also found that the general theme of branching disparate fields in order to "combine resources," so to speak, and solve big problems carried important implications for my own research goals in the psychology of learning and memory. In general, the book left me feeling motivated and inspired, both to immerse myself in my research and explore maths further. Singh has left me with the quiet confidence that I may actually have the capacity to understand and even excel in an area heretofore mentally closed off to me if I just put my mind to it, a feeling that I have never experienced until now.
This book has undone all of that in one fell swoop that had me staying up late, hesitant to stop reading and eager to learn more.
Simon Singh weaves a fantastically accessible tale of history, tragedy, intellectual conquest, and the triumphs of the human mind. And, of course, pure maths. He thoroughly explains a number of challenging mathematical concepts and proofs that could easily baffle non-mathematicians, softening them in just the right ways without oversimplifying. Never once does he condescend or patronize, and it's clear that he expects his readers to do a bit of work to follow along; for me, a sort of math-phobic, this book presented the perfect blend of clarification and challenge, the sort of exploration I've come to expect from my best graduate-level lecturers in my own field.
Not only did I learn a lot of history and a remarkable amount of maths (the appendix offers some proofs for the reader to work through, in addition to the main text, and I'm happy to say I was able to work them out with Singh's helpful elucidation), I also found that the general theme of branching disparate fields in order to "combine resources," so to speak, and solve big problems carried important implications for my own research goals in the psychology of learning and memory. In general, the book left me feeling motivated and inspired, both to immerse myself in my research and explore maths further. Singh has left me with the quiet confidence that I may actually have the capacity to understand and even excel in an area heretofore mentally closed off to me if I just put my mind to it, a feeling that I have never experienced until now.
Really fascinating, this. The only reasons I'm not giving this 5 stars, are the following:
1. Fascinating as it is, I can't imagine ever reading this again. 5 stars are reserved for books that I feel I could read again - even if I never do.
2. There are several occasions where Singh makes a point three or four times in the same paragraph, as if we didn't understand it the first time. I may not be able to understand much actual maths, but I can understand words. Stop repeating yourself.
And that is all! Otherwise there's a lot to enjoy as Singh takes us through the entire history of mathematics and how it all combined to allow Andrew Wiles to solve a 300 year old puzzle - with an heroic amount of innovation and perseverance. There's an emotional and tense denouement and a final twist in the tale that reveals that, in spite of Wiles proving Fermat's Last Theorem, it isn't possible that Fermat did it in the same way. So either there's another (likely much simpler) proof, or Fermat didn't have a proof at all.
1. Fascinating as it is, I can't imagine ever reading this again. 5 stars are reserved for books that I feel I could read again - even if I never do.
2. There are several occasions where Singh makes a point three or four times in the same paragraph, as if we didn't understand it the first time. I may not be able to understand much actual maths, but I can understand words. Stop repeating yourself.
And that is all! Otherwise there's a lot to enjoy as Singh takes us through the entire history of mathematics and how it all combined to allow Andrew Wiles to solve a 300 year old puzzle - with an heroic amount of innovation and perseverance. There's an emotional and tense denouement and a final twist in the tale that reveals that, in spite of Wiles proving Fermat's Last Theorem, it isn't possible that Fermat did it in the same way. So either there's another (likely much simpler) proof, or Fermat didn't have a proof at all.
I must say this was one of the easiest-to-read books about mathematics I have encountered. It told a story that stayed interesting from beginning to end, and it didn't get bogged down in calculus or even more rarefied areas of mathematics. And I especially appreciated how the proofs for various propositions were included in a series of appendices instead of interrupting the text.