Book Review. Or is it?

Sometime back, on a boring weekend I strolled in Barnes & Noble and bought a book on impulse. And ever since then I had a struggle finishing it. It is a book on Riemann Hypothesis, one of the seven unsolved problems which carry a prize tag by the Clay Institute of Mathematics.

Wait, before I go any further, I anticipate the question what the heck I'm doing reading a book on mathematics and that too a book on one of the unresolved problems. Also, people who know me would wonder what in this world made me, a first class dunce when it comes to mathematics, take up this book.

Yes, I am no good when it comes to mathematics and even to this day, my Higher secondary school teacher would remember me well enough to attest this. Which teacher would forget a guy sitting in the first bench snoring within 5 minutes of the start of the class? And that too in each and every class! The only classes I didn't sleep, I still remember, are where he lectured on the equations of parabola, ellipse and hyperbola. I don't know why I didn't sleep in those, just that I didn't. To be fair to me, the maths class was a combined two hour session scheduled immediately after lunch! Ofcourse lunch was for everybody and I don't know why & how others kept awake, while only I slept. All they gave was just moral support.

My dreaming in maths classes didn't help a bit. I came dangerously close to failing in that paper.I had to go to extra tuition to make sure I clear the paper in the school finals. But still I had an extra-large dose of heebie-jeebies when waiting for the results. To my huge surprise I cleared, albeit with very low marks.
So I and Mathematics didn't have a cordial relationship for a very long time. Then sometime later in my aborted attempt at an engineering diploma, I had the fortune to have two eminent teachers of Mathematics, Mr.Raman and Mr.N.Srinivasan.They made I and Mathematics shake hands and smile a bit too! But it was too late by then. The school finals could not be revisited and so my dreams of studying B.E going on to acquire an electrical engineering degree and become a software guy went bust.
So whenever possible, I pursue my efforts to befriend those school subjects who once bullied me mercilessly. You never know when an acquaintance with a subject will help you. For example if I were to date a woman, who happens to be a Fields medal aspirant, I can hold my own when the discussion veers to zeta functions and how the Mertens function if proved true could have solved the Riemann hypothesis! I would nod my head intelligently. Otherwise I would be just nodding my head. See the difference?

Ofcourse men are put to tremendous hardship when figuring out what a woman's interests are and boning up on them. The easy way is to date a woman who works or studies with you. In this case you have enough time to gather intelligence , use it to good effect and then pop the question and the cork.

"Oh What a tangled web we weave,
when first we practise to deceive!"

As typical ads for cards, toys and shoes predict, women do not simply go ga-ga over teddy bears, chocolates and candies. They do that but not just that. For example in my pursuits I had to learn two, three languages, literature, music, poetry, quantum physics and what not. I am not going to tell the languages I had to sidle upto, incase smart deducers who call themselves my friends, find out my objects of pursuit, by trial, error and elimination. Those missions might have failed, but still the documents have to remain classified.

Men comparitively are more simple. Talk to us about the ball game of the country, cricket, soccer, baseball or basketball and we are putty. Me, you can talk to about how the one day cricket has corrupted the Test cricket's techniques, how when the ball gets the inner edge when the batsman tries to drive long-offishly, and goes to the fine-leg boundary, the crowds still applaud and you'll have me gazing fondly at you. Even otherwise I'll gaze fondly at you but in my mind I'll be thinking about whether India can convincingly win a Test match even while missing Sachin due to injury. Ofcourse in the first place "you" has to be feminine in gender.

So my hypothesis is that the longer men are single, the more intelligent they become trying to master various topics of conversation. Atleast the more intelligible they sound.

Okay, I have deviated much from my original intention that is to review the book I read. The book by Karl Sabbagh gives a layman level intro to the Riemann hypothesis. Don't ask me to explain the hypothesis. I've read it but I cannot lecture on it. It's all for intelligent nodding, remember? I am not supposed to spout formulae. Well, the reason I purchased it because, three years back, I chanced upon a book on Fermat's theorem and how the Fermat Theorem was proved by Andrew Wiles. That book by Simon Singh (if I remember correctly, I am not sure) went at a blistering pace, the narrative similar to a thriller fiction. That made me buy this book and I then found that this book doesn't have the same pace, but still okay. Actually this book narrates the history behind the hypothesis and the ongoing struggle to prove or disprove the hypothesis interestingly.

The Riemann Hypothesis, if true, proves that there is a rule for generating the prime numbers, the building blocks of all other numbers. At the moment it cannot be proved that such a rule operates. The distribution of prime numbers in the long list of whole numbers do not fit to any pattern and look random. But Bernhard Riemann identified a mathematical function, now called the Riemann zeta function which is a sum of series whose expression involves complex numbers. This Riemann zeta function generates an infinite set of numbers called the zeroes of the function which describe the prime number distribution. Too abstract, atleast for me.The book assumes that the reader is pretty ignorant about Mathematics, which is fine by me for the most part. But at times the author takes this too far when he explains what a numerator and a denominator are! I recommend this book for readers like me, once badly bitten (by mathematics) but not shy.

Title: The Riemann Hypothesis-The Greatest Unsolved problem in Mathematics
Author: Karl Sabbagh
Publishers: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY.
www.fsgbooks.com

P.S: Except about the book and my academic performance, rest all are work of fiction!