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.
