‘Completely? Not even in a perturbative framework? You really think it’s possible?’ ‘Conditional regularity? You mean, modulo minimal regularity bounds?’ ‘My old demon’s back again - regularity for the inhomogeneous Boltzmann.’ ‘So what’s up? Your message was pretty vague.’ The story begins with what sounds like a duff episode of Star Trek: It is an account of how Professor Villani won the Fields medal, the greatest prize in mathematics, for a theorem about… to be honest, I have no idea what his theorem (or most of his book) is about, because the professor never explains it. It is entirely new: his book is impenetrable from page four. But when done well, such as by Simon Singh or Alex Bellos, this approach is revelatory.Ĭédric Villani has come up with a fourth method. Often such books blow up two-thirds of the way through, when the author tries to bring the subject up to date in a explosion of impenetrable jargon that leaves the reader feeling panic-stricken and utterly stupid. This is to mathematics what a Smarties McFlurry is to haute cuisine.
The third, and most common, method is to toy with the subject using a combination of anecdotes and interviews. (This is John Derbyshire’s style: his Unknown Quantity is one of the best histories of algebra there is.) Another tactic is to get down your old university textbooks, take a deep breath and train the reader up through the mathematical basics of your chosen subject, using a combination of technical exercises and metaphors. G.H Hardy’s 1940 classic, A Mathematician’s Apology, is the best example of this approach. There are three ways to write a popular maths book. I have realised that I’ve had been looking at Villani’s Theorem in the wrong light.
There’s hardly a chapter in Birth of a Theorem that I could enjoy. An honest reviewer should obey his prejudices, so I’ve tried to find a way to cover up my dislike of Cédric Villani’s book, just as I tried to find a way I could slag off John Derbyshire’s excellent Prime Obsession (about the Riemann Hypothesis) when it came out. To give the problem extra calculus, my favourite maths writer is a sour-faced white supremacist with a mouth the shape of staple, who thinks women in America should be deprived of the vote and apparently calls himself ‘Derb’. But as a contribution to the genre of popular maths, the book stinks. Birth of a Theorem is by one of the great geniuses of today, a cosmopolitan, liberal-minded man who helps his wife look after their children, likes big-hearted folk songs, welcomes diversity and wears the same jewellery as I do.
0 kommentar(er)
