Book Review: Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality

This is a review of Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel.

This book is about love, or Langlands program¹, or the generality of group theory, or beauty. Most of the content feels like text book to me, such as Discrete Groups, Group Representation, etc.

Unlike physics, it’s much harder to write math popularization. I can quickly get what he is talking about because I’m learning Group Theory this semester. Without the theorems and equations I learned, I would have a much more vague idea of the content in the book. But anyway, the purpose of popularization is always get the reader to learn the real thing. I just did the latter one first.

Math is beautiful and touching even, but physics is not, physics is messy and realistic. I mean, I’m still interested in and constantly amazed by all kinds of connections, even tiny and trivial ones, see δ. But connections are lack in real world, because people play different games in different aspects of life, see Book review: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. We have talked about Quantum Gravity for a really long time, yet here we are.

The story in chapter 2 is heartbroken. I’m sorry that it happened to him or anybody. His experience reminds of this quote:

You are the captain of your own ship. You have the power at any moment to CHOOSE. Make sure you’re choosing from a place of your vision and not in reaction to the circumstances that present themselves.

And when you did choose, work harder.