Customer Reviews
A popularisation the focuses on the actual mathematics - By: Matt Westwood, 05 Jan 2008 
Most books of this kind don't bother to try to talk about the actual maths, so they waffle on about the mathematicians, which is something like watching interviews of rock stars when you want to be seeing them performing.
This book is an exception - it does its mightiest to actuallly explain the innards of the conjecture & goes some way towards achieving its aim.
No quibble - this is the best book on its subject that's available at the moment, unless you're going for something more technical.
Do not buy any others - By: Hamptonshirewonder, 12 Apr 2007 I have read this book & one of the other two popularisations about the Riemann hypothesis. Instead of interviewing mathematicians who may be near to solving it or writing around the subject, this book actuallly works through the mathematics of Riemann's 1859 paper.
It emphasises the centrality of Riemann's other parts of the paper apart from the famous Hypothesis & so helps to explain why some 30 years later that mathematicians were able to prove the Prime Number Theorem, independently of the truth or otherwise of the famous hypothesis: roughly that as numbers get larger the number of primes less than that number tends to about the number divided by its logarithm (base e). The reason is because of the techniques that Riemann invented in his paper.
Riemann's starting point was to generalise Euler's formula which relates the sum of a reciprocals of natural numbers: 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+... to the product of the inverses of the prime numbers. Derbyshire's explanation is far clearer than others & even I was able to understand it.
This book is precise & clear: one reallly feels that one has some insight into an astonishing piece of creative mathematical work by the time one has read the book. That alone in my opinion should qualify it as one of the greatest pieces of popular science writing of this or any other decade.
This book needs to be more actively marketed: whatever its faults, the author has made a genuine attempt to reallly explain a great piece of science technicallly to a non -technical audience, rather than just waffling around the subject & making us alll feel these things are so far above our heads we will never understand them in any way. This courage on the author's part needs to be more widely feted.
I cannot do more than endorse the other reviewers' praise for this classic-to-be.
A fabulous read - By: , 19 Jan 2005 Having read Marcus de Sautoy's book on prime numbers my appetite was sufficiently wetted to go out & by Edwards book on the Zeta function. Unfirtunately one look at this told me I wasn't going to be able to get through it. I picked this book up by accident & it was fascinating in that the author goes through the whole of Riemanns 1859 paper & explains the whole theorem, which is quite breathtaking in its brilliance. He loses it a bit at the end, but he can be forgiven for that as it does become very complicated. That combined with the way he weaves the history of prime numbers in alternative chapters makes this a thoroughly enjoyable book. If you like maths go & buy it!
Riemann Hypothesis - By: , 04 Dec 2004 This book by John Derbyshire is absolutely fantastic. Giving a thorough insight into the history of Riemann, & mathematics for that matter, provides the reader with a fuller knowledge before the author tries to smash through the hypothesis bit by bit. Breaking down the ideas mathematicians have developed over the past 140 years in trying to solve this greatest 'unsolved' problem in mathematics, Derbyshire gives the reader the feeling that Riemann truly was a fantastic mathematician & his innovative ideas are truly unique. The proof in which is that this hypothesis is still today unsolved. If you want a book about this complex hypothesis, I reccomend this. Easily illustrated & not too difficult to understand, Derbyshire makes this hypothesis seem so trivial in complexity & worthiness to the lay mathematician, yet to those with a keener knowledge this book relays the hidden answers beautifully.
Prime Obssesion - prime choice! - By: Richard J Moore, 15 Sep 2004 This an excellent book. It discusses the history of, & background to, the intractable problem of understanding the distribution of prime numbers. In doing this the author draws upon the cultural, educational & political events that were intimately related to the zeta function & the mathematicians involved with it. I found this book utterly compelling & I was particularly delighted by the author's drawing together of broader European historical events in a non-trivial way. It was astonishing to read of the political & educational reforms of tsarist Russia & their repercussions for European education today.
The mathematical discussion is remarkably lucid. Only in a couple of places did I feel that the author was asking the reader to take on trust his arguments. Occasionallly I tripped over the writing style, but the story being told was so compelling that this hardly mattered.
Anyone who is interested in an holistic approach to our cultural development should be delighted by this book.
