Book recommendations based on data from real readers.
Books like Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem
xn + yn = zn, where n represents 3, 4, 5, ...no solution"I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." With these words, the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat threw down the gauntlet to future generations. What came to be known as Fermat's Last Theorem looked simple; proving it, however, became the Holy Grail of mathematics, baffling its finest minds for more than 350 years. In Fermat's Enigma--based on the author's award-winning documentary film, which aired on PBS's "Nova"--Simon Singh tells the astonishingly entertaining story of the pursuit of that grail, and the lives that were devoted to, sacrificed for, and saved by it. Here is a mesmerizing tale of heartbreak and mastery that will forever change your feelings about mathematics.
Liked Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh? Here's what readers who loved it picked up next.
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman (1984) · 4.29★
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (1995) · 3.95★
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979) · 4.3★
- Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick (1987) · 3.98★
- QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman (1985) · 4.23★
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1987) · 4.12★
- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene (1999) · 4.06★
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) · 4.11★
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986) · 4.32★
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006) · 3.89★
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick (1992) · 4.16★
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1997) · 4★