What if you had to take an art class in which you were taught only how to paint a fence, but were never shown the paintings of van Gogh or Picasso? 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. Mathematics, he writes, directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars.
Awarded the 2015 Euler Book Prize, 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.
At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which empowers us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the hidden magic universe of mathematics.
Love and Math was a New York Times bestseller and has been named one of the best books of the year by Amazon and iBooks. It has been published in 19 languages. Apart from the English language original, it has been published in Brazil (where it was on the non-fiction bestseller list for several weeks), Germany (Amazon bestseller), Italy, Poland, France (Amazon bestseller), Russia (science bestseller), Japan (non-fiction bestseller list), Spain (No.3 on the non-fiction bestseller list), Portugal (No.3 on a general bestseller list), Korea, Holland, Turkey, Vietnam, Greece, Hungary, and China. Arabic translation was published in January 2018; Czech translation in April 2020.
