Prime obsession: Bernhard Riemann and greatest unsolved proble

Bernhard Riemann was an underdog of sorts, a malnourished son of a parson who grew up to be the author of one of mathematics´ greatest problems. In Prime Obsession, John Derbyshire deals brilliantly with both Riemann´s life and that problem: proof of the conjecture, "All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half." Though the statement itself parses as nonsense to anyone but a mathematician, Derbyshire walks readers through the decades of reasoning that led to the Riemann Hypothesis in such a way as to clear it up perfectly. Riemann himself never proved the statement, and it remains unsolved to this day. Prime Obsession offers alternating chapters of step-by-step math and a history of 19th-century European intellectual life, letting readers take a breather between chunks of well-written information. Derbyshire´s style is accessible but not dumbed-down, thorough but not heavy-handed. This is among the best popular treatments of an obscure mathematical idea, inviting readers to explore the theory without insisting on page after page of formulae.