Read Online The Weil Conjectures: On Math And The Pursuit Of The Unknown Penned By Karen Olsson Released As Digital

very interesting book and exquisite narrative, One can clearly see the nature of the two Weil siblings, André and Simone, The story of The authors own experience with math is very enjoyable, It is an homage to Andrè, Simone, mathematics, mathematicians and decisions we make in life, Thanks to FSG for sending me a finished copy of this book last year unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to read it until now pbk release July,

I love this strange little book! It fits nicely alongside the work of Kate Zambreno and Maggie Nelsona fact and fiction blend of historical material and the author's personal life, where meaning often comes in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate material and the white space between sections.


Olsson's book focuses on the lives and work of the Weil siblings the more wellknown activist Simone and her mathematician brother Andre, along with the author's ruminations on her early fascination with math, which she studied at the college level before becoming a writer.
Olsson also mines the history of the mathematical field, going all the way back to the Babylonians, for pertinent anecdotes,

Of course, all of these subjects loosely cohere to form a commentary on writing and the creative life in general, In a fantastic explanation of what it's like to be a writer, Olsson admits that she didn't study enough math to be able to understand "The Weil Conjectures"Andre's vital discovery, but also the title of her own book! She emails a professor for help, but he never responds acknowledging that it's likely because he's busy or has a strict spam filter, Olsson also admits that she can't help but feel like he's not answering her on purpose because she's an outsider.
Later, they have an awkward exchange in a grocery store, and Olsson realizes they have more in common as parents than as math experts,

That's it folks, the perfect metaphor for the writing life: uncertainty, confusion, anxietymotivated anger, misunderstandingbut it sure makes a good story, Read this on my phone in pdf form, in tiny chunks whenever I got a few mins to spare, savouring its elegant conversational style interspersed with cool anecdotes.
This was a memoir written by someone trying to process her past love affair with math, by studying the psychology of two great minds of theth century, a brothersister duo, namely André and Simone Weil.
The former, one of the greatest algebraic geometers of thend half of theth century, creator of the Bourbaki group and originator of the Weil conjectures famous conjectures, now proven, relating number theory and topology.
The latter, one of the most fascinating yet enigmatic personalities of the last century, a writer, philosopher and mystic, obsessed both with the problem of human oppression and the question of transcendence.
Both led very interesting lives that wove into each other's in intricate ways, This memoir was very heartfelt and insightful, Reading it often made me forget about my own surroundings and absorbed me into the complex emotional tapestry weaved by the author that was equal parts uplifting and heartbreaking.
I could feel my empathy muscles growing, Increasing emotional "resolution" such that you have a momentbymoment glimpse of the inner life of a person tends to have that effect, It expands your soul and diminishes the ego, Love this genre of memoir It's a happy balance b/w the completely fictional and completely factual, It both gave interesting facts since it was based on actual people and explored the human psyche in depth like any good novel, "Even as mathematics presents itself from afar as an austere architecture dreamed up by singular geniuses, up close it's a torrent of transmissions, . . for every solitary discovery there are massive systems of relationships, which I begin to think of as a kind of giant math ant colony, or math hive, and I begin to wonder whether.
. . the desire for mathematical revelation, the wish to dwell in a perfect, abstract world, is secretly, unconsciously twinned by another desire for communication, One the negative imprint of the other, Abstraction the flip side of love, " And, according to what Olsson presents of the Weil siblings, they are negative imprints of each other, One a gifted mathematician and the other a philosophical thinker, To be clear, I am not completely sure what Olsson's purpose was in writing this book, as it is not pure biography there's a lot of autobiography interspersed throughout the book.
It's not a straightforward historical account of the Weils or mathematics it meanders in time and place widely and frequently, Having not read Simone Weil's notebooks but having just read an account of her thought process, it would seem that perhaps Olsson is emulating Weil in form.
I realized earlier today that this book might be what it's like to have a conversation with me when I am excited about a topic and I bounce from idea to idea, often returning to the starting point, but sometimes not for a long while, but in the end, it's all connected or, I believe it is.
Olsson's writing is often elegant, almost poetic, and she clearly has a passion for mathematics and philosophical thinking, Kinda right up my alley, All my expectations of this book were upended within the first page, I was expecting, to be honest, a rather dry biographical portrait of the mathematician Andre Weil, with a tangential exploration of his relationship with his to me, more fascinating mystic philosopher sister, Simone.
What we have instead is a formally inventive and experimental book that defies categorisation, If you have picked this up looking for a straightforward biography of the Weil siblings, this is definitely NOT the place to go! The sections on Andre and Simone are novelistic and largely nonfactual they appear here as muses conjured by Olsson to help illustrate the vast wonder and unknowability of the world.
These two extreme and inexplicable geniuses spent their lives in opposition, pursuing doggedly their own private visions and matching them up to a grand teleological vision of the world that they could offer to others.
I found myself completely beguiled by this bonkers little book, which is composed of short poetic fragments, a hybrid of fiction, memoir, mathematical enquiry, history and biography.
Though, at the same time, it is none of these, What this book leaves you with is an appetite for knowledge, for that heady feeling of discovery when all the synapses of your brain are firing together and you are making connections, seeing the world anew, entering that magical fugue state where everything and nothing makes sense.
I have always been jealous of people that are mathematically minded, because that is a method of comprehending the world that will always be closed off to me.
I may never understand the beauty and importance of equations, and that saddens me, So I related a lot to Olsson's desire for mathematical knowledge, as well as her affinity for the more ineffable and spiritual pursuits of Simone.
This book celebrates curiosity and intellectual quests in a way that is fresh, inventive and immersive,

'"A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover's soul," she writes/ "He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before.
" It's not the knowledge itself, not consummation but the mood, the excitement when you are on the verge of grasping, '

'Simone dreams her brother is a tooth her own tooth, but not her own, Stuck inside her mouth and schooling her as always, She pushes at him with her tongue to wiggle him loose, although she doesn't want to be separated she still has that compulsion to dislodge him, to feel the bloody gap where he used to be.
'

'Anyone who is sufficiently patient may achieve a kind of transcendence, provided that he 'longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment,' she'll later write.
She arrives at an idea of strenuous faith, a discipline of attention, An enlightenment always just out of reach, It's a crucial epiphany, a turning point the only way she can rescue herself, that is to say the only way she can on her terms lead a life that is is not worthless, is to devote herself wholly, with every ounce of her energy, to the truth an impossible goal, really, but she would stay dedicated to it.
' Woahhh. Cool book. I've never read something structured in exactly this fashion, The structure is fascinating and, at times, confusing, but it kept me on my toes, A lot of the math stuff went right over my head, as expected, I loved getting to learn more about the life and ideas of Simone Weil, along with her twin brother, André, and consequently, see into the mind of the author.
I still don't know how to properly pronounce "Weil" though, . .

"The idea that math is immortal, that its discoveries accumulate over time but that its truths are outside of time, is implicit in its everyday language of theorem and proof, all those statements made in the eternal present tense.
But how can that be How can math be timeless even as everything that underlies itthe historically specific ways that concepts are described, manipulated, and provedshifts over the years

Proof, that seeming ironclad warranty, is at the end of the day a rhetorical device, a method of persuading others of your conclusion.
Proof in itself is hardly immune to history, It has evolved over the centuries, finding different means of expression in adhering to different standards of rigor,

But then again, Im not going to sit here and say that math is not timeless, " My friend Karen Olsson wrote a book I want to tell you about, Its about math.

Wait! Dont fall asleep! Really, Im serious. Give me a second. Honestly, if you were here for my disquisition on Jason Stathams dives in The Meg you can damn well sit through me geeking out a little bit about a clever book written by someone Ive found out is

far smarter than I ever hoped to be.
Also, theres barely any math, which is how I understood it,

One thing I learned from Olssons book is the extent to which math is just a bunch of symbols meant to represent abstract concepts about truth.
Numbers exist but are only imagined, The representation of a thing is not the thing, but that doesnt mean the representation is not its own thing,

A good example of a representation becoming its own thing is the device you might be reading this on, People have entire relationships with other people without meeting them in the flesh, We can literally read each others thoughts in the digitized word and hear the authors authentic voice, This is the online corollary to Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, for if we can never truly determine where a particle is in time and space then it follows we are all to some extent abstractions to each other, though it doesnt make us any less real.


We think of our relationship with abstractions as a new thing, but Olsson points out that novels were, at one time, novel, which ushered in “a new awareness of the inner self.
”

Distant objects or people, represented by symbols on a page: we are so accustomed to this that its hard to conceive of a time when it was a new phenomenon.
Carson compares this representing, the conjuring of things by written words, to the way that a lover constructs a mental image of an absent beloved.
Desire spans the difference between the abstract thought and the actual person, Everything is triangulatedthe lover, the beloved, the image, The writer, the thing, the word,

And then ability to relate to an abstraction led to the expansion of what could be abstracted,

According to one scholars thesis, it was the invention of writing that gave rise to number and an abstract concept, The prehistoric people of the ancient Near East, exchanging sheep or grain, originally recorded what theyd traded using clay tokens that represented the thing traded in time they began storing the tokens in a type of envelope, marking the envelope to designate what was inside of it.
Eventually they dispensed with the tokens, in favor of the marks,

The representation becomes the thing, and “we must love that which does not exist,” as Olsson quotes from Simone Weils writings, Much of Olssons memoir focuses on the relationship between two reallife siblings, Simone and André Weil, Simone, as is familiar to anyone who was especially moody and intellectual in high school, was a philosopher, mystic, and political activist, Her older, lessfamous brother came up with the Weil conjectures, which apparently provided the framework of modern algebraic geometry and number theory, In math, hes apparently a big deal, which is like your band having a hit song in Denmark or you having a girlfriend in Canada.
Its real, in theory.

I met Karen Olsson because she wrote one of my favorite political novels about Austin Waterloo: A Novel, and I invited her to speak to a group I belonged to.
Then, not wanting to rush into a successful career as a novelist, she wrote All the Houses: A Novel a decade later, Both are good and deserve more attention,

Perhaps wanting to push the throttle a little more, she started on another novel soon after All the Houses that included Simone and André as characters.
The novel was not working, so she rescued the Weil siblings from that literary no mans land and constructed around them The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, a dreamlike garden of a memoir about her fascination with math.


She writes about what she clearly sees as her failure as a math major at Harvard as climbing a sand dune that kept getting taller, but she clearly knows the subject.
She describes the field as a series of failed paths from conjecture to proof until one finds the way to the truth, Its all about how math requires abstractions to get from blueprint to construction, a good enough metaphor for the success of this, her third book.


Buy it. Its good. An elegantly written book to no particular end. TWC blends history, biography, philosophy, memoir, and fiction in telling the story of a famous pair of siblings one a mathematician, the other a philosopher/mystic.
It's a story worth telling that's been told before, TWC approaches it from a largely imagined perspective, As such, the veracity of much of her telling is left to question, This is, of course, forgivable writers do have their license, But the results to this reader at least were less compelling than I hoped they'd be, I didn't realize, as I came to this read, that it's largely a work of fiction, loosely hung on a scaffolding of fact, But I quickly realized and accepted the conceit, For all the beauty of KO's writing and imagining, though, the Weils she presents brother or sister struck me as little more thandimensional characters: stereotypes of the mathematician and the mystic.
For all KO's efforts to represent the inner lives of both, she only manages to scratch the surface, giving the entirety of this slim volume an insubstantial feel.
KO's reflections on mathematics, including her own longago math studies, and recently revived interest in the discipline resonate with my own interests, but did not make for compelling reading.
And the fact that she is unable by her own repeated admission to give any but the most trifling account of the Weil Conjectures what they are, why they matter, etc.
in a book of that very title is, to say the least, disappointing, I cannot fault readers who came to this book with a very different set of expectations for their own frustrations reading it, For my part, though my own expectations were also upset, I did at least enjoy KO's writing hence, mystar rating, TWC is a lovely 'thinkpiece', just not an especially deep or memorable one, Caveat emptor .