★★★☆☆ The Music of the Primes, by Marcus du Sautoy
Replacing precision with poetry
The Music of the Primes
Marcus du Sautoy
Replacing precision with poetry
I would probably give Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of the Primes a higher rating if I had not first read John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. I was entirely surprised by this.
Both books set out to explain the Riemann Hypothesis, a highly technical problem (the problem being that it is still a hypothesis -- we don't know if it is true). Derbyshire describes himself as a journalist. Du Sautoy is a professional mathematician -- indeed, he is a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Now, because the Riemann hypothesis is such a technical subject, both authors reach a point where they have to tell the reader, "I can't really prove the following statements for you -- you will have to take it on faith". I expected that point to come later in The Music of the Primes. It does not. It comes much earlier.
When the going gets tough, Du Sautoy gets poetic. That would be fine -- admirable, in fact -- if he did not also at the same time become imprecise. He is never inaccurate that I noticed, but he is poetically vague about key points of the Riemann hypothesis. I might have thought that inevitable -- this is a tough subject, and perhaps poetic vagueness is the best you can do, had not Derbyshire done so much better a job.