Andrew Crumey
Go Forth & Multiply
Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure
By Cédric Villani (Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise)
The Bodley Head 260pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, but there is the Fields Medal. Cédric Villani won it in 2010, and his curious memoir tells how. Rather than being a straightforward account of the mathematician’s life, or a step-by-step explanation of the problem he worked on, the book is a collage of emails, equations, quotations and observations, painting a dizzying picture of frankly unfathomable genius. Put it this way: I’m a PhD-level mathematician and, after reading this book, I still can’t figure out exactly what Villani did. But it was a fun ride.
Although comparable to the Nobel Prize in prestige, the Fields Medals are crucially different, being awarded only every four years to a maximum of four mathematicians under forty. Any contender has to be something of a wunderkind and Villani (born in France in 1973) fully fits the bill, in terms
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