The Los Angeles Times
Derbyshire's attempt to take nonmathematicians into this subject had me on the edge of my seat. Was he really going to introduce Moebius inversions in polite company? He did, and I found his treatment, and his chutzpah, consistently interesting. His account of what has happened in the last 30 years is sure-footed and perceptive. — Ben Yandell
John F. Nash, Jr.
A remarkable book.—1994 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics
The Christian Science Monitor
The most detailed, and consequently the most rewarding account of the Riemann Hypothesis is John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession. The author, a trained mathematician with a day job as an investment banker, moonlights as a novelist. This remarkable constellation of interests results in a math book that reads like a mystery novel. When, some 300 pages into the book, Derbyshire finally presents Riemann's conclusion, it is with literally breathtaking impact.
The New Criterion
...Derbyshire is a talented expositor determined to make the reader understand some serious mathematics. A general reader with some memory of high school algebra who is willing to concentrate will come away with a grasp of what the problem is and why insiders are excited. ... Late in his book, Derbyshire ambitiously but successfully unpacks [Riemann's] short and difficult [1859] paper... Explaining from a standing start what the Riemann zeta function and its zeros are in only half a book is not easy, and Derbyshire proves himself a leading mathematical communicator in being able to do it.
Keith Devlin
An informative, comprehensive, well written account of the unsolved problem that most mathematicians regard as the most important open problem in the field. Derbyshire not only tells the historical story behind the problem -- the people stuff -- he also includes all the mathematics needed to understand what the problem is about and how people are trying to solve it.—Stanford University, author of The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time
Arthur Jaffe
John Derbyshire's tour de force Prime Obsession guides one through a 200-year-long story of the world's best-known, unsolved mathematical mystery. The formulation, study, and significance of the Riemann hypothesis each represent immense areas of mathematical thought; this book expertly tackles them all. The chapters filled with anecdotes alternate with chapters that lead the novice gently by hand into the exploration of fundamental ideas...captivating the reader and creating a lasting impression.—Harvard University
Martin Gardner
The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the deepest of all unsolved problems in mathematics. Unfortunately it is difficult to state exactly what the hypothesis is. It is high time that someone would write a book explaining the hypothesis in ways understandable by ordinary mathematicians and even by laymen. Three cheers to John Derbyshire for having finally done it.—"Mathematical Games" columnist for Scientific American and author of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?
Library Journal
Thanks to a proof by Euclid, mathematicians have known for more than 2000 years that there is no limit to the population of prime numbers; they extend to infinity. However, work continues to be done on the distribution of the primes, and much of that work now centers on efforts to prove the Riemann hypothesis. Bernhard Riemann was a great 19th-century German mathematician who offered in an 1859 paper an admittedly unproven conjecture relating some zero values of a "zeta function" to the distribution of primes. The importance of this abstruse speculation for modern research is demonstrated in a recent online search of Mathematical Reviews for the term "Riemann hypothesis"; 1403 publications were found. Now there are three more books to add to the numerous studies. Derbyshire, a mathematician by training, a member of the Mathematical Association of America, and a novelist (Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream), first takes readers through well-organized mathematical fundamentals in order to give them a good understanding of Riemann's discovery and its consequences. Interspersed with the hardcore math, other chapters profile Reimann the man and trace the history of mathematics in relation to his still-unproven hypothesis. Derbyshire shows how after 150 years, the world's greatest minds still haven't found a solution. Because this book does not sugarcoat complex ideas, readers lacking at least college-level math will be hard-pressed to understand some parts. Still, this volume is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries as an excellent introduction for nonspecialists. Du Sautoy is the only professional research mathematician among these three authors, but he does not confront his readers with very many equations or other bits of mathematical apparatus. Instead, he offers nicely done verbal descriptions of the essence of the hypothesis and the efforts to prove it. Like Derbyshire, he intersperses items from math history and from the work and interactions of current researchers. Du Sautoy's book has much to offer for most academic and public libraries, especially to readers of very limited math background. Sabbagh (A Rum Affair) has written several books on a variety of topics, not all science-related. His latest emphasizes anecdotes from contemporary mathematicians who have studied Riemann's hypothesis. Indeed, he pays so much attention to a particularly idiosyncratic mathematician, ignored by the two other authors, that in his quest for human-interest material, he seems to lose sight of serious mathematical issues. Sabbagh's discussion of the actual mathematics is not so well organized, and much of it is relegated to a series of appendixes. His book is most useful in giving readers a feel for how research mathematicians live, work, and interrelate in the 21st century. Only libraries seeking comprehensive coverage of mathematics will need to get the Sabbagh work.-Jack W. Weigel, Ann Arbor, MI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
