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: The Buck Stops Here

Prime Obsession, and Robert Shiller

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

Two books that I recently read: 1) Prime Obsession, by National Review's John Derbyshire. Prime Obsession has a mix of chapters: about half address the biography and background of Bernhard Riemann, the eminent German mathematician, as well as many of his forebears, contemporaries, and successors. The other half of the chapters are a layman's explanation, starting with some elementary math, of the Riemann Hypothesis.It's a brilliant book. Derbyshire has a wonderful knack of explaining complicated mathematical concepts from the ground up. He does this so well that even a non-mathematician has at least a glimmering of a thrill when, in an anecdote, the physicist Freeman Dyson is told of the statistical distribution for the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function, and his response is, "That's the form factor for the pair correlation of eigenvalues of random Hermitian matrices!" What this means (so far as I understand it) is that the distribution of prime numbers has a completely unexpected parallel to the energy levels observed in quantum mechanical experiments...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).