Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics: Berhhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics - Softcover

Derbyshire, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452285259 ISBN 13: 9780452285255

Publisher: Plume Books, 2004

Synopsis

The definitive story of the Riemann Hypothesis, a fascinating and epic mathematical mystery that continues to challege the world.

In 1859, Bernhard Riemann, a little-known thirty-two year old mathematician, made a hypothesis while presenting a paper to the Berlin Academy titled "On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity." Today, after 150 years of careful research and exhaustive study, the Riemann Hyphothesis remains unsolved, with a one-million-dollar prize earmarked for the first person to conquer it.

Alternating passages of extraordinarily lucid mathematical exposition with chapters of elegantly composed biography and history, Prime Obsession is a fascinating and fluent account of an epic mathematical mystery that continues to challenge and excite the world.

About this title

Review

Bernhard Riemann was an underdog of sorts, a malnourished son of a parson who grew up to discover one of the greatest problems in mathematics. In Prime Obsession, John Derbyshire deals brilliantly with both Riemann's life and that problem, which was to find proof of the conjecture "all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half".

That statement may be nonsense to anyone but a mathematician but Derbyshire walks the reader through the decades of reasoning that led to the Riemann Hypothesis in a way that makes it perfectly clear. Riemann never proved the statement and it remains unsolved to this day.

Prime Obsession offers alternating chapters of step-by-step maths and a history of 19th-century European intellectual life, letting readers take a breather between chunks of well-written information. Derbyshire's style is accessible but not dumbed-down, thorough but not heavy-handed. This is among the best popular treatments of an obscure mathematical idea and allows readers to explore the theory without insisting on page after page of formulae.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who could prove the Riemann Hypothesis, but luminaries like David Hilbert, GH Hardy, Alan Turing, André Weil and Freeman Dyson have all tried before. Will the Riemann Hypothesis ever be proved? "One day we shall know," writes Derbyshire and he makes the effort seem very worthwhile. --Therese Littleton, Amazon.com

Review

"Derbyshire's attempt to take nonmathematicians into this subject had me on the edge of my seat."--Los Angeles Times

"Riemann and his colleagues come to life as real characters and not just adjectives for conjectures and theorems."--Scientific American

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0452285259
• ISBN 13: 9780452285255
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448