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The Weil Conjectures by Karen Olsson
£9.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781526607546
Published:
09 Jul 2020
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
224 pages
Dimensions:
198x129x22mm
Weight:
0.182kgs
Author:
Simone Weil: famous French philosopher, writer, political activist, mystic - and sister to André, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century. For Karen Olsson, who studied mathematics at Harvard only to turn to writing as a vocation, the lives and obsessions of these two extraordinary siblings returned her to the intellectual passions of her youth. When Olsson got hold of the 1940 letters between Simone and André, she discovered that André's pursuit of his studies became increasingly incomprehensible to his sister, leading to Simone directly questioning him about the value of such rarefied knowledge as it applied to the lived experience. Struck by this conflict, Olsson revisits her own time at university, how she came to be consumed by mathematics, and the unexpected similarities that can be found between two seemingly opposed subjects.
_______________
'Beguiling ... I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge' - New York Times
'A wonderful book ... Reading it is akin to kicking a can along the road of higher learning' - Patti Smith
'A remarkable tour de force' - Standpoint
_______________
Simone Weil: philosopher, political activist, mystic - and sister to André, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. These two extraordinary siblings formed an obsession for Karen Olsson, who studied mathematics at Harvard, only to turn to writing as a vocation.
When Olsson got hold of the 1940 letters between the siblings, she found they shared a curiosity about the inception of creative thought - that flash of insight - that Olsson experienced as both a mathematics student, and later, a novelist.
Following this thread of connections, The Weil Conjectures explores the lives of Simone and André, the lore and allure of mathematics, and its significance in Olsson's own life.
About the Author: Karen Olsson is the author of the novels Waterloo and All the Houses. She has written about politics, science and popular culture for magazines including the New York Times Magazine and Texas Monthly, where she is a contributing editor, and has had work anthologized in Best American Science Writing and Best of the Best American Science Writing, among other places. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family. karenolsson.com @olssonic
| Number of pages | 224 |
|---|
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