Sleeping in Class

If you are going to write 300 pages on a topic that probably doesn’t have any business being the subject of a general-interest book, you ought to at least make it compelling. If it is, say, a book about the mysteries of mathematics that you’re writing, you’d better concentrate on the eccentric characters, not the inscrutable numbers. And if it is a lay audience you’re writing for, you’d better explain to us dummies why any of this matters in the first place.

Unfortunately, Karl Sabbagh does none of the above. Sabbagh’s The Riemann Hypothesis might have been an accessible antidote to the recent trend in which math geeks are portrayed as misunderstood artistes (Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind). Instead, this is one of the dreariest and most disappointing books in recent memory.

Worse, Sabbagh’s book is symptomatic of a larger problem in Big Publishing, one that turns glorified magazine articles into $25 hardcovers. Remember the book that chronicled the many lives of table salt? The history of a single punch thrown in an NBA game 25 years ago?

If you answered no, you aren’t alone.

The Riemann Hypothesis, as it happens, was set forth by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann in 1859. Riemann’s theory was an attempt to arrive at a clearer understanding of how prime numbers—numbers like 7 or 19, which can’t be produced by multiplying together two smaller whole numbers—are distributed throughout the so-called "real numbers." Not the sexiest stuff in the world, but get this: There are no more than 30 mathematicians believed capable of proving the hypothesis correct. And though some of the world’s most nimble minds have been wrestling with the RH for 150 years, a mathematical proof is likely decades away.

Working with this sort of scientific mystery, the author should’ve had little trouble making this a story of achievement and failure that anyone could relate to. But Sabbagh, a producer of television for the BBC and others, seems far more interested in the problem’s complexity than the fascinating men—and they are all men—trying to solve it. And so rather than allowing the eccentricities and single-mindedness of his mathematicians to propel the story (there is some of this but not nearly enough), Sabbagh resorts to quoting from theorems and mathematical dictionaries in order to show us that much of higher math is "entirely opaque."

Sabbagh’s many missteps would almost be tolerable if he were able to explain why any of us should care about the RH. Alas, he is not. After a tour through a century and a half of math, the best he can offer is a lame cop-out: "[I]t would be surprising if the research [the RH] has stimulated and the new fields of mathematics it has spawned didn’t lead to future developments in how we understand the world."

The mathematician who someday comes up with a proof for the RH may in fact help us "understand the world" a bit better, but this book surely will not.

The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics By Karl Sabbagh Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $25