An awesome, globe-spanning, and New York Times bestselling journey through the beauty and power of mathematics
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. Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously on the faculty at Harvard University. The winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics, he has contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, Slate, and the Scientific American blog. A New York Times Science Bestseller "Powerful, passionate and inspiring."-New York Times "Love and Math is a book by a very brilliant Russian-born mathematician, Edward Frenkel, who tells his life story while he's telling you some of the fundamentals of mathematics in language that interested laypeople can understand."-Moshe Safdie, New York Times, Sunday Review "[Frenkel's] winsome new memoir... is three things: a Platonic love letter to mathematics; an attempt to give the layman some idea of its most magnificent drama-in-progress; and an autobiographical account, by turns inspiring and droll, of how the author himself came to be a leading player in that drama." -New York Review of Books "With every page, I found my mind's eye conjuring up a fictional image of the book's author, writing by candlelight in the depths of the Siberian winter like Omar Sharif's Doctor Zhivago in the David Lean movie adaptation of Pasternak's famous novel. Love and Math is Edward Frenkel's Lara poems... As is true for all the great Russian novels, you will find in Frenkel's tale that one person's individual story of love and overcoming adversity provides both a penetrating lens on society and a revealing mirror into the human mind." -Keith Devlin, Huffington Post "Love and Math = fast-paced adventure story + intimate memoir + insider's account of the quest to decode a Rosetta Stone at the heart of modern math. It all adds up to a thrilling intellectual ride--and a tale of surprising passion."-Steven Strogatz, Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics, Cornell University, and author of The Joy of x "Through his fascinating autobiography, mathematician Edward Frenkel is opening for us a window into the ambitious Langlands Program--a sweeping network that interconnects many branches of mathematics and physics. A breathtaking view of modern mathematics."-Mario Livio, astrophysicist, and author of The Golden Ratio and Brilliant Blunders "This very readable, passionately written, account of some of the most exciting id
