The Prime Number Conspiracy
The Biggest Ideas in Math from Quanta

A collection of essays from Quanta magazine. As founding editor Thomas Lin explains in the introduction, the magazine was started intending to produce high-quality, literary science coverage (akin to the pieces Jeremy Bernstein used to write for the New Yorker) that only focused on things with no re......more

It could be a better book, if they’d had the energy to rewrite the book to be more consistent and less repetitive. The articles are arranged by topic. Sometimes two subsequent articles need to define a concept, so both of them do it. Sometimes the articles seem to assume the reader knows math. Sometim......more

An attempt to explain a lot of really advanced mathematics to an audience of people with technical training but no specialist knowledge of the area. As such, it tries to do far too much in a very limited space. Each chapter discusses an idea so broad and deep that it needs a whole book of its own. S......more

You have to approach this book for what it is: a collection of loosely related magazine articles and accept the disjointedness and occasional repetition of primers on certain topics. That aside, this is a wonderful peek into the minds and lives of world-class mathematicians. The topics can be very es......more

A bunch of essays in current Mathematical fields pulled from Quanta Magazine. I’ve loved reading an essay or two every so often and going about my week. Math is more artistic than people realize, especially at the highest levels. This book can help people love to learn about it and the people who ar......more