Barry Mazur

Prime numbers are beautiful, mysterious, and beguiling mathematical objects. The mathematician Bernhard Riemann made a celebrated conjecture about primes in 1859, the so-called Riemann hypothesis, which remains one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. Through the deep insights of the authors, this book introduces primes and explains the Riemann hypothesis. Students with a minimal mathematical background and scholars alike will enjoy this comprehensive discussion of primes. The first part of the book will inspire the curiosity of a general reader with an accessible explanation of the key ideas. The exposition of these ideas is generously illuminated by computational graphics that exhibit the key concepts and phenomena in enticing detail. Readers with more mathematical experience will then go deeper into the structure of primes and see how the Riemann hypothesis relates to Fourier analysis using the vocabulary of spectra. Readers with a strong mathematical background will be able to connect these ideas to historical formulations of the Riemann hypothesis.

"The interpolations tying mathematics into human life and thought are brilliantly clear."Booklist"Her presentation is conversational and humorous, and should help to simplify some complex concepts."KirkusInfinity. It sounds simple but is it? This elegant, accessible, and playful book artfully illuminates one of the most intriguing ideas in mathematics. Lillian Lieber presents an entertaining, yet thorough, explanation of the concept and cleverly connects mathematical reasoning to larger issues in society. Infinityincludes a new foreword by Harvard professor Barry Mazur."Another excellent book for the lay reader of mathematics In explaining infinity], the author introduces the reader to a good many other mathematical terms and concepts that seem unintelligible in a formal text but are much less formidable when presented in the author's individual and very readable style."Library Journal"Mrs. Lieber, in this text illustrated by her husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, has tackled the formidable task of explaining infinity in simple terms, in short line, short sentence technique popularized by her in The Education of T.C. MITS."Chicago Sunday TribuneLillian Lieberwas the head of the Department of Mathematics at Long Island University. She wrote a series of lighthearted (and well-respected) math books in the 1940s, includingThe Einstein Theory of Relativity andThe Education of T.C. MITS (also published by Paul Dry Books).Hugh Gray Lieberwas the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Long Island University. He illustrated many books written by his wife Lillian.Barry Mazuris a mathematician and is the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author ofImagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen). He has won numerous honors in his field, including the Veblen Prize, Cole Prize, Steele Prize, and Chauvenet Prize."

Barry Mazur invites lovers of poetry to make a leap into mathematics. Through discussions of the role of the imagination and imagery in both poetry and mathematics, Mazur reviews the writings of the early mathematical explorers and reveals the early bafflement of these Renaissance thinkers faced with imaginary numbers. Then he shows us, step-by-step, how to begin imagining these strange mathematical objects ourselves.

This work is a comprehensive treatment of recent developments in the study of elliptic curves and their moduli spaces. The arithmetic study of the moduli spaces began with Jacobi's "Fundamenta Nova" in 1829, and the modern theory was erected by Eichler-Shimura, Igusa, and Deligne-Rapoport. In the past decade mathematicians have made further substantial progress in the field. This book gives a complete account of that progress, including not only the work of the authors, but also that of Deligne and Drinfeld.

The intention of the authors is to examine the relationship between piecewise linear structure and differential structure: a relationship, they assert, that can be understood as a homotopy obstruction theory, and, hence, can be studied by using the traditional techniques of algebraic topology. Thus the book attacks the problem of existence and classification (up to isotopy) of differential structures compatible with a given combinatorial structure on a manifold. The problem is completely "solved" in the sense that it is reduced to standard problems of algebraic topology. The first part of the book is purely geometrical; it proves that every smoothing of the product of a manifold M and an interval is derived from an essentially unique smoothing of M. In the second part this result is used to translate the classification of smoothings into the problem of putting a linear structure on the tangent microbundle of M. This in turn is converted to the homotopy problem of classifying maps from M into a certain space PL/O. The set of equivalence classes of smoothings on M is given a natural abelian group structure.