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A review by jennyrpotter
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel
2.0
This author was a guest on the Colbert Report, which is when I first learned of his book. He described the concept so passionately, and he argued that mathematics has been so misunderstood because it isn't given its fair due in K-12 school curricula. Frenkel is disillusioned that the general masses don't appreciate math, and he set out to conquer our hearts with this book. He stated that this book was written specifically for people like me, laypeople who have never had the opportunity to give math a fair shake because all they learn are boring basic concepts in school and they never see the true beauty of it. He compared it to taking an art class in which you only get to paint a fence and are never actually shown the works of great artists. Fair enough, I thought. I'll give it a try.
By chapter three, I realized that Edward Frenkel is a misguided genius who truly believes that laypeople could possibly understand what he is talking about. I don't sense that he is a self-righteous individual who wants to come across as ridiculously smart (he is, in fact, ridiculously smart). I think he really just doesn't get that trying to relate these concepts to people like me, who only made it through Calc A, cannot be done. Hence, large parts of the book left me absolutely lost. Even BJ, who was a math minor, said he wasn't keeping up and so he quit reading it. Consider this sentence: "The idea of string theory is that by doing calculations in these sigma models and summing up the results over all possible Riemann surfaces E (that is, over all possible paths of the strings propagating in a fixed space-time S) we can reproduce the physics that we observe in space-time S." Honestly, I wish this particular sentence, which I chose at random, was a stand-apart in terms of its difficulty, but the truth is that much of this book is written in this language with ten unfamiliar concepts thrown together in the same sentence, all with the assumption that we must understand what the heck he is talking about.
The redeeming points of the book were the interspersed memoir portions, which were extremely interesting. Frenkel was born in the Soviet Union and endured intense antisemitism at practically every turn in his education, but still prevailed and eventually traveled to Harvard and then to UC-Berkeley with professorships. I very much loved hearing about his experiences growing up, in college, working with colleagues, and his personal excitement about solving mathematical problems. It was only that he felt the need to then delve INTO those problems with technical language that made this book a disappointment--along with the fact that I didn't feel it delivered what it originally promised.
In the end, I walked away appreciating Edward Frenkel's personal story. However, I did NOT end up appreciating math anymore than I ever did before, which was precisely why I decided to read the book in the first place. Unless you're ready to skip some major portions or else you're a mathematician, I don't recommend this book to you. This book is truly written for mathematicians, not laypeople, as it was so described.
By chapter three, I realized that Edward Frenkel is a misguided genius who truly believes that laypeople could possibly understand what he is talking about. I don't sense that he is a self-righteous individual who wants to come across as ridiculously smart (he is, in fact, ridiculously smart). I think he really just doesn't get that trying to relate these concepts to people like me, who only made it through Calc A, cannot be done. Hence, large parts of the book left me absolutely lost. Even BJ, who was a math minor, said he wasn't keeping up and so he quit reading it. Consider this sentence: "The idea of string theory is that by doing calculations in these sigma models and summing up the results over all possible Riemann surfaces E (that is, over all possible paths of the strings propagating in a fixed space-time S) we can reproduce the physics that we observe in space-time S." Honestly, I wish this particular sentence, which I chose at random, was a stand-apart in terms of its difficulty, but the truth is that much of this book is written in this language with ten unfamiliar concepts thrown together in the same sentence, all with the assumption that we must understand what the heck he is talking about.
The redeeming points of the book were the interspersed memoir portions, which were extremely interesting. Frenkel was born in the Soviet Union and endured intense antisemitism at practically every turn in his education, but still prevailed and eventually traveled to Harvard and then to UC-Berkeley with professorships. I very much loved hearing about his experiences growing up, in college, working with colleagues, and his personal excitement about solving mathematical problems. It was only that he felt the need to then delve INTO those problems with technical language that made this book a disappointment--along with the fact that I didn't feel it delivered what it originally promised.
In the end, I walked away appreciating Edward Frenkel's personal story. However, I did NOT end up appreciating math anymore than I ever did before, which was precisely why I decided to read the book in the first place. Unless you're ready to skip some major portions or else you're a mathematician, I don't recommend this book to you. This book is truly written for mathematicians, not laypeople, as it was so described.