A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
**
"Wilkinson has accomplished something more moving and original, braiding
his stumbling attempts to get better at math with his deepening
awareness that there's an entire universe of understanding that will, in
some fundamental sense, forever lie outside his reach." --Jennifer
Szalai, The New York Times**
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"There is almost no writer I admire as much as I do Alec Wilkinson. His
work has enduring brilliance and humanity." --Susan Orlean, author of
The Library Book**
A spirited, metaphysical exploration into math's deepest mysteries and
conundrums at the crux of middle age.
Decades after struggling to understand math as a boy, Alec Wilkinson
decides to embark on a journey to learn it as a middle-aged man. What
begins as a personal challenge--and it's challenging--soon transforms
into something greater than a belabored effort to learn math. Despite
his incompetence, Wilkinson encounters a universe of unexpected
mysteries in his pursuit of mathematical knowledge and quickly becomes
fascinated; soon, his exercise in personal growth (and torture) morphs
into an intellectually expansive exploration.
In A Divine Language, Wilkinson, a contributor to The New Yorker for
over forty years, journeys into the heart of the divine aspect of
mathematics--its mysteries, challenges, and revelations--since
antiquity. As he submits himself to the lure of deep mathematics, he
takes the reader through his investigations into the subject's big
questions--number theory and the creation of numbers, the debate over
math's human or otherworldly origins, problems and equations that remain
unsolved after centuries, the conundrum of prime numbers. Writing with
warm humor and sharp observation as he traverses practical math's
endless frustrations and rewards, Wilkinson provides an awe-inspiring
account of an adventure from a land of strange sights. Part memoir, part
metaphysical travel book, and part journey in self-improvement, A
Divine Language is one man's second attempt at understanding the
numbers in front of him, and the world beyond.