Fearless symmetry

What Hacker News says

1. nhatcherFeb 2026
   I'm sure it's a great book :).

   I find good popular books on higher mathematics difficult to come by. A nice exception is the trilogy written by Avner Ash and Robert Groß:

   Elliptic Tales, Fearless Symmetry and Summing it up (in my order of preference)

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2. zyklu5Oct 2024
   As a first pass, check out the pop history book called Fearless Symmetry by Ash and Gross.

   Next, and perhaps I shouldn't be suggesting it, Serre's A Course in Arithmetic. Despite it's reputation of terseness it is a great book by one of history's great mathematicians and worth every sweat and tear spent over its short number of pages.

   Yet another way is to see the lectures by Richard Borcherds (who won the fields for the moonshine conjecture) on youtube.

   Finally, since this hacker news check out William Stein's Modular Forms: A Computational Approach (pdf online)

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3. tyler-Feb 2019
   I like this book: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Symmetry-Exposing-Patterns-N...
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4. soVeryTiredFeb 2019
   For anyone with an undergrad maths background, I'd recommend 'Fearless Symmetry' and 'Elliptic Tales'. They would be tough going for someone without a maths background, but they give a view to the forefront of some active areas of research in maths.
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5. larryfreemanFeb 2008
   Hi,

   I had the same feeling as you (when I was 38) and I started a blog: http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com

   I started with a sketch of the historical approach to Fermat's Last Theorem (Diophantus, Euler, Gauss, etc.) and I tried to resolve all proofs down to postulates.

   I would recommend finding an area that you are interested in and then finding a famous problem. My favorite books are:

   * Euler: Master of us all

   * Euclid's Elements

   * Hardy and Wright: Introduction to a Theory of Numbers

   * Jonathan Stillwell: Yearning for the Impossible

   * Ash and Gross: Fearless Symmetry

   * Jean-Pierre Tignol: Galois' Theory of Algebraic Equations

   * Edwards: Fermat's Last Theorem/Galois Theory

   I've been doing it now for almost three years and it's really worked out well for me and surprisingly, I am getting around 11,000 unique visitors to my site every month.

   Glad to see all the responses to your comment. :-)

   -Larry

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6. jaymzcampbellAug 2017
   I've got that and read it (well tried to read it) multiple times. The first few chapters I agree are readable and a nice introduction but it rapidly descends into very technical and IMO quite opaque writing. I would've preferred a book twice the length that had aspects of a maths textbook. As it stands I think the authors of that work assume far too much for the latter half of the book.

   It's also terribly typeset on Kindle. I only mention because I also recommended this book a month or so ago on the post about the quintic [1]. I gave this a 3/5 on Amazon UK. Here's my review [2]:

   > This review relates to the (shockingly expensive) kindle edition. At almost £20 you would expect the publishers to have proofed this a lot more. There are references throughout to pages and theorems that have no link (and are therefore difficult to follow on an e-reader), some footnotes are instead displayed inline which is confusing, in other places there are errors in the rendered formulas that force you to stop and re-read it to work out what bit was printed wrong.

   > The material itself is certainly interesting but the authors are I think deluding themselves if they believe this a book accessible to someone with just a knowledge of calculus. I've studied group theory formally and this book is heavy going. Part 1 is reasonable but beyond that, it quickly becomes dense and terse and far too short. I had high hopes for this book but it, unfortunately, falls short of the mark. I wish it was twice the length and with more care to the proofing during the ebook creation.

   On the topic of the Monster group, there was a very much pop-math book about it that I read called "Symmetry and the Monster". It's at the total opposite end of the spectrum compared to Fearless Symmetry (which deals with Galois theory). It's a good casual read [3] but don't expect deep insight. I would really love if there was an author like Paul Nahin [4] writing books on abstract mathematics in a similar style. If you are into just generally "advanced" books that are very readable he is an absolute joy.

   [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687242

   [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R187P6WQO86SRB/ref=cm_cr_rdp...

   [3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Symmetry-Monster-Greatest-Quests-Ma...

   [4] https://www.amazon.com/Paul-J.-Nahin/e/B001HCS1XI

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