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The Prime Number Conspiracy: The Biggest Ideas in Math from Quanta
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Quanta Magazine's stories of mathematical explorations show that "inspiration strikes willy-nilly," revealing surprising solutions and exciting discoveries.
These stories from Quanta Magazine map the routes of mathematical exploration, showing readers how cutting-edge research is done, while illuminating the productive tension between conjecture and proof, theory and intuit ...more
These stories from Quanta Magazine map the routes of mathematical exploration, showing readers how cutting-edge research is done, while illuminating the productive tension between conjecture and proof, theory and intuit ...more
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Paperback, 336 pages
Published
November 20th 2018
by MIT Press
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Start your review of The Prime Number Conspiracy: The Biggest Ideas in Math from Quanta

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. Sometimes they don’t and they call integral “an infinite sum”.
Terence Tao is overrepresented in the first half of the book.
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. Sometimes they don’t and they call integral “an infinite sum”.
Terence Tao is overrepresented in the first half of the book.

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 real-world relevance: maths, and theoretical problems in physics, biology, and computer science. It launched in 2008 - a bad time for media in general - but was funded by the Simons Foundation (billiona
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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 esoteric and difficult to grasp, but at other times are quite simple, profound and thought-provoking. But it's the biographical side that was surprisingly interesting. For some reason I find mathematici ...more
That aside, this is a wonderful peek into the minds and lives of world-class mathematicians. The topics can be very esoteric and difficult to grasp, but at other times are quite simple, profound and thought-provoking. But it's the biographical side that was surprisingly interesting. For some reason I find mathematici ...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 are making up new fields, theories and solutions right now.

Questo libro, raccolta di articoli sulla matematica pubblicati su Quanta Magazine, non è certo di semplice lettura. Gli estensori degli articoli non ne possono nulla, e anzi a parere mio hanno fatto dei miracoli nella semplificazione dei temi trattati: ma stiamo parlando di matematica di frontiera, e soprattutto di temi che non sono così sexy da arrivare nelle prime pagine dei grandi media e così rimangono sconosciute anche a chi come me in fin dei conti dovrebbe saperne un po' di più. Non aspet
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I want to read about mathematics to learn or understand something. If I'm amazed in the process, all the better. This book is thoroughly failing me. I was bored. I found the articles tedious, the mathematics unrelatable, and the people described within uninteresting. I'll probably never finish it.
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This is a collection of articles from the online science magazine "Quanta." Science journalism at its very best. A must read.
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Thomas Lin is the founding editor-in-chief of Quanta Magazine, an award-winning publication that reports on developments in science and mathematics, with content syndicated in Wired, The Atlantic, Scientific American and The Washington Post. Lin previously worked at The New York Times, where he edited online features and wrote about science, technology and tennis. He has also written for Quanta, T
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