The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics

Mathematical texts are seldom page-turners, but du Sautoy has written a book that's difficult to put down. He describes the history of the Riemann Hypothesis as an unfolding mystery, and there are genuine cliffhangers that leave you wondering what twists and turns the plot is about to take. My favorite part of the book, though, consists of the characters. Instead of dryly listing each mathematician's achievement, du Sautoy describes their personalities and quirks. If you have a background in math, you'll have heard of most of the mathematicians in this book, but perhaps not known which were womanizers, which were rivals with each other, and which were just plain nuts. I'd wager that this is the first math text ever written to start with the description of an April Fool's prank. This plot and character development means there's not as much space for technical explanations as one might like, and du Sautoy consistently avoids technical details to emphasize the ideas behind them instead. For me this was fine, since it's given me the motivation to read a more technical book, but folks who are interested only in the math behind the Riemann Hypothesis and nothing more would be happier selecting another text.

Warning!This book could change your life.A well written history of the relationship between the strange, seemingly random series of prime numbers. An essential read for anyone interested in the why and wherefore of the construction of a naturally occuring number series.

This book is quite wonderful. It is the first non-scientific book I have read this summer and I could not put it down. Dr. du Sautoy has a wonderfully light style, which makes the search for a proof of Riemann's Hypothesis as exiting as the best mystery story. What a story it is extending as it does over four centuries and taking place at the many of the worlds greatest centers of learning. It you are going to read one book on mathematics this is the one to read!

One of the attractions of number theory is that it has to do with the counting numbers; if you can get from one to two and then to three, you are well on your way to hitting all the subject matter of "The Queen of Mathematics." All those numbers can be grouped into two simple categories. The composite numbers, like 15, are formed by multiplying other numbers together, like 3 and 5. The prime numbers are the ones like 17 that cannot be formed by multiplying, except by themselves and 1. Those prime numbers have held a particular fascination for mathematicians; they are the atoms from which the composites are made, but they have basic characteristics that no one yet has fully fathomed. We know a lot about prime numbers, because mathematicians have puzzled over them for centuries. We know that as you count higher and higher, the number of primes thin out, but Euclid had a beautiful proof that there is no largest prime. However, the primes seem to show up irregularly, without pattern. Can we tell how many primes are present below 1,000,000 for instance, without counting every one? How about even higher limits? Speculating about the flow of primes led eventually to the Riemann Hypothesis, the subject of _The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics_ (HarperCollins) by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. The counting numbers turn out to be astonishingly complicated, and Du Sautoy knows that egghead number theorists will understand these complications better than we nonmathematicians, but he invites us to consider at a layman's level the importance of the particular quest of proving the Riemann Hypothesis. He is convincing in his demonstration that it is worth knowing what all the effort is about.Bernhard Riemann, a mathematician at the University of Gottingen, introduced a "zeta function," and proposed that when this particular function equals zero, all the zeros will wind up on a specific line when graphed on the complex plane. Further effort has shown that there are millions of zero points on that line, just as the hypothesis says, and no zero points have been found off the line. Neither of these facts makes a proof, however. Du Sautoy wisely shows some of the enormously complex technicalities of the speculations and computations, but makes no attempts to try to get the reader to comprehend the hypothesis at the level he does. There are a number of reasons that the proof is so important. Right now there are a large number of tentative proofs of important mathematical ideas; they are all based on the Riemann Hypothesis being true, but of course, it has not itself been proved. A proof would tell us more about the prime distribution and finding primes, and this subject has become vital since cryptography, including how you privately send your credit card number across the internet, is based on prime numbers and the difficulty of factoring two big primes multiplied together. The way the Riemann zeros are di

This is an exceptionally interesting book on the nature of prime numbers. The author succeeds on two fronts, he makes an incredibly vexing mathematical problem understandable to the lay person, AND he successfully explains most of the attacks against the problem for the last 150 years in a way that is both intrigueing and understandable. This is NOT a book with pages and pages of formulae, but it does contain a rich description of this problem which helps make it accessible to the curious mind.The author has provided an excellent index at the back of the book for people that want to delve further. In addition, the author mentions several websites in the book that are helpful. The book contains many interviews with people currently working in the field to solve this problem .. but what I found most interesting, was how far ahead of his time Riemann himself was. The fact that he was able to come up with this hypothesis way before the advent of modern computational equipment and the ability to compute the zeroes necessary in the formula ... truly marks him as a unique mind. What would he be like if he lived today, with our supercomputers and other aids to computation?I felt the book was very thought provoking on several fronts, the author's style was quite accessible, and it was enjoyable reading.