Author: Karen Olsson
A rare work of non-fiction that intricately weaves together biography, memoir, history and philosophy, and written with prose of precision and poetic lucidity, The Weil Conjectures is nothing short of a complete seduction in the art of mathematics, and the mysterious nature of scientific and creative thought.
Critic Parul Sehgal said in a review for The New York Times that Karen Olsson’s “beguiling new book, The Weil Conjectures, arrives as a corrective, describing mathematics — its focus, abstraction, odd hunches, blazing epiphanies — as a powerful intoxicant, a door to euphoria.”
She twines her arguments around the story of the Weil siblings: Andre and Simone, the philosopher and secular saint — “the only great spirit of our time,” according to Camus.
Sehgal said: “The book unfurls effortlessly, loose and legato. There are no real revelations — the subjects are well known and long dead. There are no stakes; there is no suspense. I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge.”
