Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality - Hardcover

Frenkel, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465050743 ISBN 13: 9780465050741

Publisher: Basic Books, 2013

Synopsis

A New York Times Science Bestseller

What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren’t even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.

In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we’ve never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.

Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.

At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1997 after spending a few years on the faculty at Harvard University. His recent work has focused on the Langlands Program and dualities in Quantum Field Theory. Frenkel has authored two monographs and over eighty articles in mathematical journals, and he has lectured on his work around the world. The winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics, he lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

U.C. Berkley mathematician Frenkel reveals the joy of pure intellectual discovery in this autobiographical story of determination, passion, and the Langlands program—a sort of Grand Unified Field Theory of mathematics. As a teenager Frenkel was converted from math hater to eager theorist by a mathematical friend of the family, enough to pursue it despite his struggles against an unapologetically anti-Semitic Soviet educational system. Frenkel writes casually of climbing over the fence to sit in on advanced classes at Moscow State University, a top school that didn&'t accept Jews. With the help of mentors, he worked hard and eventually found his way to Harvard and the freedom to focus on his research. Frenkel balances autobiographical narrative with enthusiastic discussions of his own work on the Langlands program, a web of algebraic conjectures named after a Canadian mathematician that is noted for its usefulness in organizing seemingly chaotic data into regular patterns full of symmetry and harmony, and its applications to quantum theory. While the math can be heavy going, Frenkel&'s gusto will draw readers into his own quest, pursuing the deepest realities of mathematics as if it were a giant jigsaw puzzle, in which no one knows what the final image is going to look like. B&w illus. (Oct.)

After Rick and Isla meet at a dinner party and fall in love, what’s next? For Frenkel, it is the mathematical charting of the Rick-Isla relationship as a trajectory on the x-y plane. The surprising notion of a “formula of love” fits into the remarkable understanding of math Frankel unfolds as he recounts his labors on conceptual frontiers where an audacious new master theory, the Langlands Program, is linking geometry, number theory, and algebra. To qualify for a role in those labors, Frenkel defied the anti-Semitism pervading the Soviet academic world in which he came of age and then won appointment to a Harvard professorship. Aware that few of his readers share his academic training, Frenkel pares the technical details to a minimum as he reflects on the platonic transcendence of mathematical concepts and marvels at their mysterious utility in explaining physical phenomena. Not merely dry formulas in textbooks, the math Frenkel celebrates fosters freedom and, yes, even distills the essence of love. A breathtaking personal and intellectual odyssey. --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465050743
• ISBN 13: 9780465050741
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 304