Love and Math—The Heart of Hidden Reality

Author: Edward Frenkel
Publisher: Basic Books 2013

I wrote the following little note to Amazon reviews several years ago.  (Frenkel asked me to write a review, when I requested him to sign my copy of the book.)  

A little boy who grew up in a small town closer to Moscow became interested in quantum physics by reading popular science books. Both of his parents were engineers and they realized son’s talents early on.  They requested a mathematics professor, a family friend, to take the boy under his wings. The professor asked him if he knew about the group SU(3). This conversation made him realize that he had to learn math to answer many questions he had about quantum physics. 

Thus began the journey of this boy becoming one of the premier mathematicians of today. He was lucky to be introduced to great mathematicians from the beginning. He attended Israel Gelfand’s legendary seminars at Moscow State University. He solved his first problem on Braid groups as a freshman.  He was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard even before he received his bachelor’s degree. However, it was a temporary job since he did not have a degree yet. To obtain a degree He enrolled in the Harvard PhD program and received his PhD in one year. He first heard of the Langlands Program at Harvard. Since then until today he has been working on the Langlands Program. Langlands program is like a Rosetta stone revealing similarities in three apparently unrelated fields; namely, Number theory, Riemann surfaces and Quantum Physics. 

The book "Love and Math" is Edward Frenkel’s autobiography. He has done a masterful job of trying to bring hard mathematics that he has been working on to a level of an average reader by inter-vowing it with his fascinating life experiences. It is hard not to get excited about the math that you practically know nothing about. "Love and Math" makes you wanting to read more and get to know more about this fascinating mathematics. Frenkel has included many references for an interested reader to follow through as notes at the end of the book. "Love and Math" is a must read for young and old alike.  Edward Frenkel is a professor at University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Langlands received the Abel Price for 2018 for his life-time contributions to Mathematics.  (The Abel Price for Mathematics is like the Nobel price for Physics.)