Love and Math, Frenkel

Half-autobiography from Edward Frenkel, half-description of his research.

I read this after watching this video about the Riemann hypothesis where he recommends it at the end. It was pretty good – I think, weirdly, the best parts of it were the autobiographical accounts rather than the actual descriptions of mathematics. There’s this phenomenon with describing mathematics to a general audience, like in YouTube videos or in popular mathematics books, where lots of care will be taken to describe comparitevly basic things, such as modular arithmetic, and then very little explanation will be given for the more complicated stuff, which is presented a lot more plainly. I understand why this happens; it’s easy to describe and build intuition for modular arithmetic rather than the complicated abstract stuff where he says it’s likely that only a few people in the world understand the “nuts and bolts” of.