quasimathematicianĀ replied to yourĀ post:
The Frenkel book is really interesting, but also...
Whatās the book called?
Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, by Edward Frenkel.
Itās a combination of Frenkelās autobiography, charting how he started out as a Jew in an extremely anti-semitic Soviet Union, and eventually became an extremely successful mathematician, charting his career and the topics he worked on.Ā Tied into this is an explanation of the math heās worked on, and the Langlands program more generally.
I think the book is more or less a failure at its stated primary goal, which is to make the beauty of math accessible to people with no exposure to math.Ā Frenkel said heās trying to not use any jargon, and to keep everything at a level comprehensible to people with no background.Ā I believe him that heās trying; I donāt believe that heās succeeding.Ā Ā
(In the first ninety pages heās defined generating functions, modular forms, groups, group representations, the fundamental group of a Riemann surface, and the Galois groups of number fields and function fields on curves).
Iām finding it annoying at points, because it sometimes gets a bit preachy and self-satisfied about the extremely deep beauty of mathematics and the amazing aesthetic experience and how it connects us to a deeper reality.Ā Itās an excellent versionĀ of that, though; Iām saving a bunch of quotes to beĀ ārepresentations of how many mathematicians think about this stuffā.
But he also has a bunch of amusing anecdotes and a bunch of really good lines.Ā Ā
Writing papers was the punishment we had to endure for the thrill of discovering new mathematics.
āI cannot send you with every issue [of this journal] so you would explain to each subscriber what this result was good for, now can I?Ā This has to be written clearly in the paper, OK?ā
While in prison, Weil wrote a letter to his sister....I sometimes jokes that perhaps we should jail some of the leading mathematicians to force them to express their ideas in accessible terms, the way Weil did.
And honestly, I needed a good overview of how the Langlands program fits together, and this seems to fit the bill.Ā (I know pieces, and I work on a fragment of it, but I never got my head around how the whole thing fits together).
But itās a good overview of the Langlands program for me, a PhD number theorist.Ā I donāt think itās a good overview for people who topped out at calculus or at trigonometry.
















