Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, National Academy of Sciences, 0309085497, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

Challenging, but worth it

The great German mathematician, David Hilbert was once asked what question would he ask if could come back in 500 years' time. His response was immidiate:

"Has anyone proved the Riemann Hypothesis?"

Reading this book, you'll understand why Hilbert didn't hesitate. This is by far the most 'mathematical' of the popular books on the RH, and if you are a mathematical numpty like me, you might be discouraged at first glance. Don't be!!! Derbyshire actually does a really good job of walking you through it. It's an extremely rewarding read. I particularly like the way he also wove in the politcal and social upheavals that were taking place in Germany and Europe in general at the time that Riemann was formulating his hypothesis.

Interesting

I enjoyed the first half of the book - which provides a good background of the subject matter. Towards the latter half I grew weary of the author's style of writing and also found all the non-mathematical anecdotes annoying. I think the author's effort to dumb everything down ultimately destroys the point of the book. But this is a good starting point for a layperson who is interested in the Riemann hypothesis. I yearn for a more mathematical book, though.

A popularisation the focuses on the actual mathematics

Most books of this kind don't bother to try to talk about the actual maths, so they waffle on about the mathematicians, which is something like watching interviews of rock stars when you want to be seeing them performing.

This book is an exception - it does its mightiest to actually explain the innards of the conjecture and goes some way towards achieving its aim.

No quibble - this is the best book on its subject that's available at the moment, unless you're going for something more technical.

Do not buy any others

I have read this book and one of the other two popularisations about the Riemann hypothesis. Instead of interviewing mathematicians who may be near to solving it or writing around the subject, this book actually works through the mathematics of Riemann's 1859 paper.
It emphasises the centrality of Riemann's other parts of the paper apart from the famous Hypothesis and so helps to explain why some 30 years later that mathematicians were able to prove the Prime Number Theorem, independently of the truth or otherwise of the famous hypothesis: roughly that as numbers get larger the number of primes less than that number tends to about the number divided by its logarithm (base e). The reason is because of the techniques that Riemann invented in his paper.

Riemann's starting point was to generalise Euler's formula which relates the sum of a reciprocals of natural numbers: 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+... to the product of the inverses of the prime numbers. Derbyshire's explanation is far clearer than others and even I was able to understand it.

This book is precise and clear: one really feels that one has some insight into an astonishing piece of creative mathematical work by the time one has read the book. That alone in my opinion should qualify it as one of the greatest pieces of popular science writing of this or any other decade.

This book needs to be more actively marketed: whatever its faults, the author has made a genuine attempt to really explain a great piece of science technically to a non -technical audience, rather than just waffling around the subject and making us all feel these things are so far above our heads we will never understand them in any way. This courage on the author's part needs to be more widely feted.

I cannot do more than endorse the other reviewers' praise for this classic-to-be.

A fabulous read

Having read Marcus de Sautoy's book on prime numbers my appetite was sufficiently wetted to go out and by Edwards book on the Zeta function. Unfirtunately one look at this told me I wasn't going to be able to get through it. I picked this book up by accident and it was fascinating in that the author goes through the whole of Riemanns 1859 paper and explains the whole theorem, which is quite breathtaking in its brilliance. He loses it a bit at the end, but he can be forgiven for that as it does become very complicated. That combined with the way he weaves the history of prime numbers in alternative chapters makes this a thoroughly enjoyable book. If you like maths go and buy it!

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