Love and Math

A New York Times Science Bestseller

What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren’t even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.

In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we’ve never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.

Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.

At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.

Table of Contents

1 A Mysterious Beast

2 The Essence of Symmetry

3 The Fifth Problem

4 Kerosinka

5 Threads of the Solution

6 Apprentice Mathematician

7 The Grand Unified Theory

8 Magic Numbers

9 Rosetta Stone

10 Being in the Loop

11 Conquering the Summit

12 Tree of Knowledge

13 Harvard Calling

14 Tying the Sheaves of Wisdom

15 A Delicate Dance

16 Quantum Duality

17 Uncovering Hidden Connections

18 Searching for the Formula of Love

About the Author

Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1997 after spending a few years on the faculty at Harvard University. His recent work has focused on the Langlands Program and dualities in Quantum Field Theory. Frenkel has authored two monographs and over eighty articles in mathematical journals, and he has lectured on his work around the world. The winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics, he lives in Berkeley, California.