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A review by sgunther
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel
4.0
Having a degree in English, I tend to be overly critical of nonfiction books like this—ones which should really be judged more on content than on writing. Frenkel's writing isn't bad—it's perfectly clear, engaging, sometimes even funny. But it isn't extraordinary, either; and the memoir bits suffer from their disjointedness—they're told in uninspired chronological order and feel a bit lacking in narrative arc. That said, these are in many ways the most enjoyable parts of the book; they provide a firsthand account of antisemitism in Soviet Union mathematics/academia, which is nearly fascinating enough to merit its own book.
Having a degree in pure math, and being (full disclosure) a former student* of Professor Frenkel, I'm inclined to think of myself as something of an ideal reader of the mathematical parts of this book, or even an overqualified one. However, although Frenkel's voice is full of passion (as it was in class) and he tries his best to simplify complicated concepts to make them accessible to an ill-equipped audience (as he did in class), his efforts are not quite enough. This is partially his fault but mostly the fault of the material itself, which is so abstract, so arcane, that it is difficult for even the smartest people (let alone myself, at best an average student in his class) to even begin to comprehend. So it is doubtful that much of the math he describes goes anywhere but over the heads of the intended lay audience. However, even the most dumbfounded, mathless reader should come away the better for having glimpsed a sense of the abstract nature of advanced mathematics, gaining at least an understanding that what Mathematicians do is worlds away from calculations—it is nothing short of creation, discovery, magic. Take my engineer father, for example—math-savvy as he is, he studied no further than calculus and has no idea how to relate to what I studied in college; Love and Math might help a person like him relate to a person like me. And in that respect, I think, Frenkel succeeds.
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*Math 110 (Linear Algebra), UCB, Spring 2016
Having a degree in pure math, and being (full disclosure) a former student* of Professor Frenkel, I'm inclined to think of myself as something of an ideal reader of the mathematical parts of this book, or even an overqualified one. However, although Frenkel's voice is full of passion (as it was in class) and he tries his best to simplify complicated concepts to make them accessible to an ill-equipped audience (as he did in class), his efforts are not quite enough. This is partially his fault but mostly the fault of the material itself, which is so abstract, so arcane, that it is difficult for even the smartest people (let alone myself, at best an average student in his class) to even begin to comprehend. So it is doubtful that much of the math he describes goes anywhere but over the heads of the intended lay audience. However, even the most dumbfounded, mathless reader should come away the better for having glimpsed a sense of the abstract nature of advanced mathematics, gaining at least an understanding that what Mathematicians do is worlds away from calculations—it is nothing short of creation, discovery, magic. Take my engineer father, for example—math-savvy as he is, he studied no further than calculus and has no idea how to relate to what I studied in college; Love and Math might help a person like him relate to a person like me. And in that respect, I think, Frenkel succeeds.
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*Math 110 (Linear Algebra), UCB, Spring 2016