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**
**
"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 is challenging--soon transforms
into something greater than a belabored effort to learn math. Despite
his incompetence, Wilkinson encounters a universe of unexpected
questions 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
more than forty years, journeys into the heart of the divine aspects of
mathematics--its mysteries, difficulties, and revelations--from
antiquity to the present. 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 in 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.