Amir D. Aczel, a visiting scholar in the history of science at Harvard, earned both his B.A. in mathematics and master of sciences degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. His books have been translated into fifteen languages.
"Aczel does a superb job...A mathematical bonbon of a book."
"Aczel maps the strange, beautiful byways of modern mathematical
thought in ways the layperson can grasp."
"It employs a staggering range of abstract devices, which Mr. Aczel
is a dab hand at explaining: Abelian varieties, Galois
representations, automorphic forms, and on and on."
"Aczel does a superb job...A mathematical bonbon of a book."
"Aczel maps the strange, beautiful byways of modern mathematical
thought in ways the layperson can grasp."
"It employs a staggering range of abstract devices, which Mr. Aczel
is a dab hand at explaining: Abelian varieties, Galois
representations, automorphic forms, and on and on."
It is extremely unusual for an advance in pure mathematics to draw the attention of the press worldwide. However, there was a great furor in 1993 when Andrew Wiles announced he had derived a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which had defeated mathematicians for more than 300 years. This brief book, written by a statistician rather than a number theorist, presents for the general public the long historical background, the awkward temporary retraction by Wiles, and his final triumph in 1995. The human drama is well presented, but the discussion of the mathematics itself is less successful. The author makes a good start in dealing with the fundamentals but leaps too quickly for lay readers into more complex ideas laden with jargon that is only partially explained. The book might have worked better if the author had taken several dozen additional pages to work through the mathematical concepts in more detail. For larger math collections.‘Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor
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