What do you think?
Rate this book
The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown
A New York Times Editors' Pick and Paris Review Staff Pick
"A wonderful book." --Patti Smith
"I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
An eloquent blend of memoir and biography exploring the Weil siblings, math, and creative inspiration
Karen Olsson's stirring and unusual third book, The Weil Conjectures, tells the story of the brilliant Weil siblings--Simone, a philosopher, mystic, and social activist, and Andr�, an influential mathematician--while also recalling the years Olsson spent studying math. As she delves into the lives of these two singular French thinkers, she grapples with their intellectual obsessions and rekindles one of her own. For Olsson, as a math major in college and a writer now, it's the odd detours that lead to discovery, to moments of insight. Thus The Weil Conjectures--an elegant blend of biography and memoir and a meditation on the creative life.
Personal, revealing, and approachable, The Weil Conjectures eloquently explores math as it relates to intellectual history, and shows how sometimes the most inexplicable pursuits turn out to be the most rewarding.
"A wonderful book." --Patti Smith
"I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
An eloquent blend of memoir and biography exploring the Weil siblings, math, and creative inspiration
Karen Olsson's stirring and unusual third book, The Weil Conjectures, tells the story of the brilliant Weil siblings--Simone, a philosopher, mystic, and social activist, and Andr�, an influential mathematician--while also recalling the years Olsson spent studying math. As she delves into the lives of these two singular French thinkers, she grapples with their intellectual obsessions and rekindles one of her own. For Olsson, as a math major in college and a writer now, it's the odd detours that lead to discovery, to moments of insight. Thus The Weil Conjectures--an elegant blend of biography and memoir and a meditation on the creative life.
Personal, revealing, and approachable, The Weil Conjectures eloquently explores math as it relates to intellectual history, and shows how sometimes the most inexplicable pursuits turn out to be the most rewarding.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
83 people are currently reading
1303 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
August 25, 2019
I am a mathematician. At least, I have a PhD in math. This book was a great reminder of why I study what I study. It's a compulsion. There is something different about mathematics; something timeless and irritatingly beautiful.
I saw this book more of a love letter to mathematics than anything else. The throughput is the fascination with mathematics and the world which it takes you too.
Great book, thanks for the reminder.
I saw this book more of a love letter to mathematics than anything else. The throughput is the fascination with mathematics and the world which it takes you too.
Great book, thanks for the reminder.
July 9, 2019
One of those books that makes you feel as if the numinous is almost palpable, for once.
Simone Weil is a historical, almost mythic figure who keeps recurring in my life. If you do not know who she is, here is a representative tidbit: though frail, she was intent upon parachuting herself down onto the front lines of World War II in order to heal soldiers (and, more importantly, martyr herself). I do seek her out myself, yes, but she also pops up independently. It made perfect sense to find an advanced reader's copy of this book by chance on my workplace book cart.
I absolutely loved the process of getting through the book. I am in awe of both Weil siblings now, and have reestablished my high school appreciation of math, though I barely understood what Andre Weil was getting at with his conjectures. What Simone was getting at, whatever it was, though much more numinous, is more important to me. But the fascinating thing is that Olsson was able to illuminate so much more of Simone's impassioned spiritual thinking by way of sketching out her brother's much more grounded intelligence.
Olsson has an acute sense of the way to make non-fiction historical events feel present and visible. I particularly loved the way she would question her own aim metafictionally within the text. Even though it was a memoir, it felt autofictional, because so much of it was immersive. I'm grateful for the communion of this text.
Simone Weil is a historical, almost mythic figure who keeps recurring in my life. If you do not know who she is, here is a representative tidbit: though frail, she was intent upon parachuting herself down onto the front lines of World War II in order to heal soldiers (and, more importantly, martyr herself). I do seek her out myself, yes, but she also pops up independently. It made perfect sense to find an advanced reader's copy of this book by chance on my workplace book cart.
I absolutely loved the process of getting through the book. I am in awe of both Weil siblings now, and have reestablished my high school appreciation of math, though I barely understood what Andre Weil was getting at with his conjectures. What Simone was getting at, whatever it was, though much more numinous, is more important to me. But the fascinating thing is that Olsson was able to illuminate so much more of Simone's impassioned spiritual thinking by way of sketching out her brother's much more grounded intelligence.
Olsson has an acute sense of the way to make non-fiction historical events feel present and visible. I particularly loved the way she would question her own aim metafictionally within the text. Even though it was a memoir, it felt autofictional, because so much of it was immersive. I'm grateful for the communion of this text.
July 11, 2019
My friend Karen Olsson wrote a book I want to tell you about. It’s about math.
Wait! Don’t fall asleep! Really. I’m serious. Give me a second. Honestly, if you were here for my disquisition on Jason Statham’s dives in The Meg you can damn well sit through me geeking out a little bit about a clever book written by someone I’ve found out is far smarter than I ever hoped to be. Also, there’s barely any math, which is how I understood it.
One thing I learned from Olsson’s 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 doesn’t 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 other’s thoughts in the digitized word and hear the author’s authentic voice. This is the online corollary to Heisenberg’s 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 doesn’t 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 it’s 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 triangulated—the 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 scholar’s thesis, it was the invention of writing that gave rise to number and an abstract concept. The pre-historic people of the ancient Near East, exchanging sheep or grain, originally recorded what they’d 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 Weil’s writings. Much of Olsson’s memoir focuses on the relationship between two real-life 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, less-famous brother came up with the Weil conjectures, which apparently provided the framework of modern algebraic geometry and number theory. In math, he’s apparently a big deal, which is like your band having a hit song in Denmark or you having a girlfriend in Canada. It’s 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 man’s 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. It’s 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. It’s good.
Wait! Don’t fall asleep! Really. I’m serious. Give me a second. Honestly, if you were here for my disquisition on Jason Statham’s dives in The Meg you can damn well sit through me geeking out a little bit about a clever book written by someone I’ve found out is far smarter than I ever hoped to be. Also, there’s barely any math, which is how I understood it.
One thing I learned from Olsson’s 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 doesn’t 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 other’s thoughts in the digitized word and hear the author’s authentic voice. This is the online corollary to Heisenberg’s 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 doesn’t 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 it’s 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 triangulated—the 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 scholar’s thesis, it was the invention of writing that gave rise to number and an abstract concept. The pre-historic people of the ancient Near East, exchanging sheep or grain, originally recorded what they’d 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 Weil’s writings. Much of Olsson’s memoir focuses on the relationship between two real-life 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, less-famous brother came up with the Weil conjectures, which apparently provided the framework of modern algebraic geometry and number theory. In math, he’s apparently a big deal, which is like your band having a hit song in Denmark or you having a girlfriend in Canada. It’s 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 man’s 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. It’s 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. It’s good.
August 11, 2019
I seem to be less impressed with this book than other reviewers. It is as much about Karen Olsson as André and Simone Weil, allegedly about an "obsession" with mathematics but in fact it's something less, something more ordinary like the effort of making sense of one's life. Nothing wrong with that, but as is the case with most of us, it's not especially compelling.
My chief grumble is that the book really doesn't tell us much about the Weil siblings. We get a sketch of their biography, and a superficial sense of André's contribution to mathematics. Simone comes off as a complete nutcase, which perhaps she was, but she was also capable of sustained brilliance. There's almost nothing here that conveys the power and passion of what she actually wrote.
Simone pestered André to describe his mathematical discoveries. He responded: "Telling nonspecialists of my research or of any other mathematical research, it seems to me, is like explaining a symphony to a deaf person. It could be attempted, you could talk of images and themes, of sad harmonies or triumphant dissonances, but in the end what would you have? A kind of poem, good or bad, unrelated to the thing it pretends to describe." That well conveys my own impression of this book.
My chief grumble is that the book really doesn't tell us much about the Weil siblings. We get a sketch of their biography, and a superficial sense of André's contribution to mathematics. Simone comes off as a complete nutcase, which perhaps she was, but she was also capable of sustained brilliance. There's almost nothing here that conveys the power and passion of what she actually wrote.
Simone pestered André to describe his mathematical discoveries. He responded: "Telling nonspecialists of my research or of any other mathematical research, it seems to me, is like explaining a symphony to a deaf person. It could be attempted, you could talk of images and themes, of sad harmonies or triumphant dissonances, but in the end what would you have? A kind of poem, good or bad, unrelated to the thing it pretends to describe." That well conveys my own impression of this book.
July 28, 2019
This book ended up very special to me. Like the author, I majored in math (well, history, too) as an undergrad. Like the author, I felt like the beauty of the subject was always just beyond reach, but also felt like I got a glimpse of it when I fiddled with my Abstract Algebra problem sets. I’ve never found myself highlighting, and lingering on, so many passages as I did reading this book.
The style of the book is unique, not so much logical or argumentative as it is poetic. Readers who like this book will love Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and vice-versa. Readers who hate this book will hate Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and vice-versa.
I enjoyed reading about the Weils, but felt like Simone got the short end of the stick at times. The last thing Olsson says about her is that she was “unhinged.” Still, this book was nothing short of magical for me, if only because the author and I seem to have much in common.
The style of the book is unique, not so much logical or argumentative as it is poetic. Readers who like this book will love Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and vice-versa. Readers who hate this book will hate Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and vice-versa.
I enjoyed reading about the Weils, but felt like Simone got the short end of the stick at times. The last thing Olsson says about her is that she was “unhinged.” Still, this book was nothing short of magical for me, if only because the author and I seem to have much in common.
December 3, 2023
right after I graduated high school my senior year English teacher recommended me this book, saying that reading this book had reminded her of me. I added it to my list then but never got to it—I tried to check it out at my college library but the library didn't own the book and they wouldn't purchase it, I spotted it at the Strand bookstore but could not purchase it because I was about to see a concert and could not bring books into the venue. these are poor excuses for why it took me until after I graduated college to finally start reading this book, but it honestly may have been for the better that I waited until now to read it, having gained more clarity on the nature of abstract mathematics and conducting mathematical research and having had a brief but substantial intent to do abstract math myself, much like the author. many thoughts: on the idea of the "troubled genius" (simone weil, taniyama, etc etc), the idea of "normal smart" versus "clear genius" (the author), the sylvia plath fig tree (what could have been!), and the search for truth and why. why am I ....?
June 4, 2022
I loved Karen Olsson's first book, Waterloo, a 2005 novel about Austin, Texas. I read it just as I was moving here to Austin to live, in 2021. Soon after, I joined a book group, which consisted largely of people who had recently moved here. Members accepted my suggestion to read Waterloo. Honor required that I lead the discussion. I contacted Olsson and, to my surprise, she agreed to appear, via Zoom, at the meeting of our book group. She was charming. At the end of the discussion, I thought I would give a little plug for her new book (i.e., this one), so I asked if you could understand the book if you didn't know more than average about math. She said you could.
I have read the book now, and can confirm that this is true. As a matter of fact, a lot of the book is about the author's failed attempts to understand various bits of esoteric math, which made me feel better about my ignorance. (Also, a lot of the book is about Simone Weil and the Weil family, no math knowledge required.)
However, many names of incomprehensible math things are named. Usually, I would, in a Goodreads review, list them and provide links to either the Wikipedia entry or some other explanatory web page, to help readers coming after me. However, having attempted for a few hours to find such pages, I state without fear of contradiction that reading about these things will be of little use, except to confirm that most of us will never, ever, understand them. However, I hate to let a good list go to waste, so here they are, without links: Diophantine equations, unitary operations in Hilbert spaces, ergodic hypothesis, Dedekind's generalization of the Riemann zeta function, Brouwer fixed-point theorem, Letschetz fixed-point theorem, homotopy theory, Sylow theorems, Riemann surfaces.
However, there is a pop-culture music reference that I may assist you with, in case you are as completely clueless as I am about the tunes that the cool kids are listening to. On page 179, Olsson writes about Simone Weil: “Having written so relentlessly and died so young, she acquired, after death, the burnish of genius cut short, an Elliott Smith for the Partisan Review set.” Elliott who? See Wikipedia entry here.
(For a recent arrival in Austin like me, passing references to music and musicians too cool to have made an impression where I used to live are a routine occurrence.)
The book reads a little like the writer started a more conventional “non-fiction novel” about the Weil family, and also started a more conventional memoir, and then decided to splice them together. I hope that doesn't seem like a put-down – it's not meant to be.
Frankly, Simone Weil (in common with all of her family) seemed like she was easier to read about than to actually experience first hand. However, like a lot of smart but difficult people, she was often nattering on about discomforting stuff that the rest of us are more comfortable ignoring: “Surely Simone Weil, as odd as some of her beliefs and proposals were, was right to emphasize the importance of sustained attention, which is something we are letting slip away, or really giving away, with little more than mild, fleeting second thoughts” (p. 99).
I enjoyed this book, but I generally enjoy eccentric and personal books. It gave me a relaxed and enjoyable way to learn about things I didn't know so much about.
I received an electronic copy of this book as a birthday present from the Long Suffering Wife.
I have read the book now, and can confirm that this is true. As a matter of fact, a lot of the book is about the author's failed attempts to understand various bits of esoteric math, which made me feel better about my ignorance. (Also, a lot of the book is about Simone Weil and the Weil family, no math knowledge required.)
However, many names of incomprehensible math things are named. Usually, I would, in a Goodreads review, list them and provide links to either the Wikipedia entry or some other explanatory web page, to help readers coming after me. However, having attempted for a few hours to find such pages, I state without fear of contradiction that reading about these things will be of little use, except to confirm that most of us will never, ever, understand them. However, I hate to let a good list go to waste, so here they are, without links: Diophantine equations, unitary operations in Hilbert spaces, ergodic hypothesis, Dedekind's generalization of the Riemann zeta function, Brouwer fixed-point theorem, Letschetz fixed-point theorem, homotopy theory, Sylow theorems, Riemann surfaces.
However, there is a pop-culture music reference that I may assist you with, in case you are as completely clueless as I am about the tunes that the cool kids are listening to. On page 179, Olsson writes about Simone Weil: “Having written so relentlessly and died so young, she acquired, after death, the burnish of genius cut short, an Elliott Smith for the Partisan Review set.” Elliott who? See Wikipedia entry here.
(For a recent arrival in Austin like me, passing references to music and musicians too cool to have made an impression where I used to live are a routine occurrence.)
The book reads a little like the writer started a more conventional “non-fiction novel” about the Weil family, and also started a more conventional memoir, and then decided to splice them together. I hope that doesn't seem like a put-down – it's not meant to be.
Frankly, Simone Weil (in common with all of her family) seemed like she was easier to read about than to actually experience first hand. However, like a lot of smart but difficult people, she was often nattering on about discomforting stuff that the rest of us are more comfortable ignoring: “Surely Simone Weil, as odd as some of her beliefs and proposals were, was right to emphasize the importance of sustained attention, which is something we are letting slip away, or really giving away, with little more than mild, fleeting second thoughts” (p. 99).
I enjoyed this book, but I generally enjoy eccentric and personal books. It gave me a relaxed and enjoyable way to learn about things I didn't know so much about.
I received an electronic copy of this book as a birthday present from the Long Suffering Wife.
Read
January 13, 2023Woahhh. 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 it--the historically specific ways that concepts are described, manipulated, and proved--shifts 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, I’m not going to sit here and say that math is not timeless."
"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 it--the historically specific ways that concepts are described, manipulated, and proved--shifts 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, I’m not going to sit here and say that math is not timeless."
March 10, 2021
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 non-factual; 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.'
'"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.'
January 15, 2020
What an odd duck this book is. I'm not sure I've read anything quite like it.
Prima facie, it's a biographical reflection on the lives of the Andre and Simone Weil, a 20th Century French sibling pair who survived the war and achieved notoriety. But the author is a novelist at heart, and not only does the book read like a novel, the author also inserts her own foray into math education into the work and firmly solidifies herself as the third focal point in the story. There are other characters, diversions in the story, but you really follow these three people.
It's a curious strategy, and it kind of works. For any mortal reader who has flirted with a math education, the author is the figure in the book that becomes the most relatable. Indeed, the author makes only the slightest attempt to relate Andre Weil's contributions to the field of mathematics. It works because she is a very good writer and she captures this flirtation in verse.
I experienced then, experienced from time to time, a kind of pleasure that came only after having thought hard about math, the mental equivalent of having gone for a long run. A gentle euphoria.
As a teenager I always felt the ground moving under my feet, and there was something fixed and unassailable about math.
When it was discovered that the whole numbers couldn't fully account for even simple geometric relationships, the Greeks had to start over, he writes, at the foot of the hill. Since one could no longer be sure of anything.
Andre is the brilliant mathematician, and he achieves fame with his attempts to relate the fields of topology and number theory. But it is Simone who steals the story with her asceticism and her idealism. I think the author particularly related to Simone, who also saw in mathematics the potential to bring order to a chaotic world.
Simone "thinks she might receive divine wisdom from the material world the way a blind person is informed by a cane," she writes. "The universe would become an instrument. Through it she would know God."
Both the author and Simone must reconcile their own very human capacities for math. Simone finds herself led to a devotion of Christian mysticism, and she dies very young by some combination of tuberculosis and self-starvation. The author is led to write this book.
The overachieving B-plus student will recognize the sentiments.
Prima facie, it's a biographical reflection on the lives of the Andre and Simone Weil, a 20th Century French sibling pair who survived the war and achieved notoriety. But the author is a novelist at heart, and not only does the book read like a novel, the author also inserts her own foray into math education into the work and firmly solidifies herself as the third focal point in the story. There are other characters, diversions in the story, but you really follow these three people.
It's a curious strategy, and it kind of works. For any mortal reader who has flirted with a math education, the author is the figure in the book that becomes the most relatable. Indeed, the author makes only the slightest attempt to relate Andre Weil's contributions to the field of mathematics. It works because she is a very good writer and she captures this flirtation in verse.
I experienced then, experienced from time to time, a kind of pleasure that came only after having thought hard about math, the mental equivalent of having gone for a long run. A gentle euphoria.
As a teenager I always felt the ground moving under my feet, and there was something fixed and unassailable about math.
When it was discovered that the whole numbers couldn't fully account for even simple geometric relationships, the Greeks had to start over, he writes, at the foot of the hill. Since one could no longer be sure of anything.
Andre is the brilliant mathematician, and he achieves fame with his attempts to relate the fields of topology and number theory. But it is Simone who steals the story with her asceticism and her idealism. I think the author particularly related to Simone, who also saw in mathematics the potential to bring order to a chaotic world.
Simone "thinks she might receive divine wisdom from the material world the way a blind person is informed by a cane," she writes. "The universe would become an instrument. Through it she would know God."
Both the author and Simone must reconcile their own very human capacities for math. Simone finds herself led to a devotion of Christian mysticism, and she dies very young by some combination of tuberculosis and self-starvation. The author is led to write this book.
The overachieving B-plus student will recognize the sentiments.
August 17, 2019
Two siblings representing the intellectual XXth Century adventure
Olssen's book is a remarkable contribution to history and philosophy. A conjoined biography of the paramount intellectual siblings Andre Weil, revolutionary personality behind the fictitious all knowing mathematician Bourbaki and Simone Weil, the pungent political and philosofical writer, this lovely biography circulates around the problem of the nature of a mathematician experience and of mathematics ontology. Surprinsingly, the theme is so beautifully written that it could be read by anyone. Jung said that any kind of personal art should be regarded as neurosis, so it's a pain to perceive an so sophisticated art that you can't share to entire society. At the same time, the biography is a true adventure, where you can encounter all your mathematical heroes and really revive their most inteqnse anedoctes.
The book presents conjectures about philosophy but also is a biographical conjecture in its sense. No boring citations and proofs, biography is art in its own terms. To the one that believes that no biographer could be so cruel as to tell the truth, neither so angelic to fake a lie, the biography sometimes make the siblings look bad. In doing so, however, she draws the characters in all their human complexity, as multidimensional beings, scaring as the n-balls in the topology class. Read it and you will know what I mean.
Olssen's book is a remarkable contribution to history and philosophy. A conjoined biography of the paramount intellectual siblings Andre Weil, revolutionary personality behind the fictitious all knowing mathematician Bourbaki and Simone Weil, the pungent political and philosofical writer, this lovely biography circulates around the problem of the nature of a mathematician experience and of mathematics ontology. Surprinsingly, the theme is so beautifully written that it could be read by anyone. Jung said that any kind of personal art should be regarded as neurosis, so it's a pain to perceive an so sophisticated art that you can't share to entire society. At the same time, the biography is a true adventure, where you can encounter all your mathematical heroes and really revive their most inteqnse anedoctes.
The book presents conjectures about philosophy but also is a biographical conjecture in its sense. No boring citations and proofs, biography is art in its own terms. To the one that believes that no biographer could be so cruel as to tell the truth, neither so angelic to fake a lie, the biography sometimes make the siblings look bad. In doing so, however, she draws the characters in all their human complexity, as multidimensional beings, scaring as the n-balls in the topology class. Read it and you will know what I mean.
September 7, 2019
Infuriating. It serves neither as a memoir for the Weil siblings, nor for the author who interjects bits of her own experiences with studying mathematics as she name-drops that she went to Harvard.
She blatantly, gleefully refuses to focus, favoring a style where one paragraph is about this and one paragraph is about something else unrelated in a different century and then in the next paragraph would you like to hear an unrelated anecdote about the Pythagoreans or perhaps about one of the Bernoullis? I suspect Ms. Olsson was pursuing her artistic voice but by the end it's unclear what I was supposed to take away from it all.
The book found its end inasmuch as two of the three lives it followed did finally come to their close, but none of the arcs closed. The brother is smart and reserved and the sister is weird, but that remained unchanged throughout. The author was intimidated by mathematicians but finds math neat, and that too is unchanged by the end. I cannot really recommend it.
She blatantly, gleefully refuses to focus, favoring a style where one paragraph is about this and one paragraph is about something else unrelated in a different century and then in the next paragraph would you like to hear an unrelated anecdote about the Pythagoreans or perhaps about one of the Bernoullis? I suspect Ms. Olsson was pursuing her artistic voice but by the end it's unclear what I was supposed to take away from it all.
The book found its end inasmuch as two of the three lives it followed did finally come to their close, but none of the arcs closed. The brother is smart and reserved and the sister is weird, but that remained unchanged throughout. The author was intimidated by mathematicians but finds math neat, and that too is unchanged by the end. I cannot really recommend it.
August 2, 2019
A fantastic and unique short book. Ostensibly about the mathematician -philosopher sibling pair, Andre and Simone Weil, the book is really more a set of vignettes about the joy of solitary study of an abstract subject like mathematics, relationships, aging, and more. A joy to read. Highly recommended!
May 1, 2021
As a physics PhD student this book really resonated with me. The author beautifully interweaves the narratives of Simone and Andre Weil and her own journey with mathematics. To me, this book was an excellent reflection on the ups and downs and the all encompassing nature of seeking abstract knowledge.
August 19, 2019
The author is fairly explicit that she is not sure what the point of this book is. But she seems to have gotten something out of writing it and I certainly got something out of reading it. It is a 'meditation' on something or a variety of things.
September 3, 2021
Wonderful math/philosophy biography paired with the author's own math story. I didn't know much about the Weil siblings before, now I can say I still don't understand what Andre came up with, and that I definitely would have found Simone very annoying. But this book was great.
March 31, 2022
Unfortunately, the book is not about the Weil conjectures, André Weil's 1949 proposals about local zeta functions. Instead, as Olsson states, it is less about "the specific math knowledge than a certain constellation of feelings that came with it." She even admits that she doesn't understand Weil's work. (In fact, she admits that she “can only follow either of them [André and his sister Simone] so far …”) The book is really a quick look at the two siblings and Olsson's own encounters with mathematics. To readers who are okay with a quick gloss over the details, that may be fine, but for those who want more math and a better understanding of the Weil conjectures, this is a disappointing book.
February 22, 2021
This book was a little too quirky for me. I thought I might relate more to it as a long-ago math major but that didn't help. I skimmed much of the math and the author's narrative of her own love affair with math. I hope there is a magazine article out there about the Weils as their story was an interesting one that wasn't fully realized in this book.
Read
June 3, 2022My favorite part of this book is how it has no citations
September 20, 2019
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 than 2-dimensional 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 long-ago 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, my 3-star rating). TWC is a lovely 'think-piece', just not an especially deep or memorable one. Caveat emptor...
July 11, 2020
Interesting dual biography (plus author memoir) of the Weil siblings, Simone the philosopher and Andre the mathematician. Andre's work is implacable logic, hence comprehensible (maybe not to us mere mortals, including the author). Simone's life and work are mystical to say the least, and often incomprehensible for not so elegant reasons.
The book explores this tension of Simone trying and failing to understand, and then rejecting Andre's abstractions concluding that math has moved away from the "people." Simone's own historical research veers into the "accessible" math of the ancient Greeks. The author's own undergrad math experience among the (math) Olympians at Harvard is understandably intimidating and leaves her like Simone, outside looking in, but with much more sympathy for the Olympians (lots of nice little detour bios of other math greats).
Ultimately, for most of us, the higher abstractions of modern mathematics will probably be enticing but inaccessible, leaving only the vicarious pleasure of reading biographies with brief glimpses of these abstract, eternal truths.
Highly recommend Andre Weil's own memoir "The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician"
The book explores this tension of Simone trying and failing to understand, and then rejecting Andre's abstractions concluding that math has moved away from the "people." Simone's own historical research veers into the "accessible" math of the ancient Greeks. The author's own undergrad math experience among the (math) Olympians at Harvard is understandably intimidating and leaves her like Simone, outside looking in, but with much more sympathy for the Olympians (lots of nice little detour bios of other math greats).
Ultimately, for most of us, the higher abstractions of modern mathematics will probably be enticing but inaccessible, leaving only the vicarious pleasure of reading biographies with brief glimpses of these abstract, eternal truths.
Highly recommend Andre Weil's own memoir "The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician"
January 9, 2020
This book is a biography and description of the work of Andre Weil, the mathematician who was one of the founders of the Bourbaki movement that revolutionized mathematics.
This book is a biography and description of the work of Simone Weil, Andre's sister who is of course prominent in her own right as a philosopher, political activist, and public intellectual.
This book is an overview of the history and philosophy of mathematics, particularly throughout the twentieth century.
This book is a memoir of the author herself, or at least of her relationship with mathematics.
This book is all of these things, and none of these things, and something else altogether. It is short and it is readable and it is well worth your time.
This book is a biography and description of the work of Simone Weil, Andre's sister who is of course prominent in her own right as a philosopher, political activist, and public intellectual.
This book is an overview of the history and philosophy of mathematics, particularly throughout the twentieth century.
This book is a memoir of the author herself, or at least of her relationship with mathematics.
This book is all of these things, and none of these things, and something else altogether. It is short and it is readable and it is well worth your time.
February 6, 2024
I was quite excited for this book after reading a great review by a historian of math. Overall, there were brilliant bits, but I found many parts a slog. Olsson writes at the start of chapter 12, “...I’ll indulge in one more digression.” This digression was a highlight - packed with vivid details. I think the long stretches about Simone and Andre got slightly tiresome for me because they were sometimes full of musings, but devoid of detail.
Overall, I liked it, but wanted to like it more.
Overall, I liked it, but wanted to like it more.
November 16, 2019
This is about a pair of siblings, the older brother a famous mathematician and the younger sister an even more famous recluse. Add the author who searches for the meaning of their existence and her own, and you get a beautiful waltz between three truth-seekers -- logos, ethos, and pathos -- the mind, the soul, and the heart.
September 26, 2019
A very interesting book and exquisite narrative. One can clearly see the nature of the two Weil siblings, André and Simone. The story of The author’s own experience with math is very enjoyable. It is an homage to Andrè, Simone, mathematics, mathematicians and decisions we make in life.
October 24, 2019
Short, impressionistic, associative meditation on math and on the siblings Weil, who remain at the heart of this enigmatic compelling tale. Brilliant.
December 3, 2021
Every great mathematician is a bit of a poet they say. Everyone but Andre Weil. Maybe, just maybe Andre was the mathematician and Simone was the poet.
December 5, 2025
I liked hearing the author talking about math as someone coming back to it. It is nice to hear people interested in something they are not inside.
Quotes:
The unknown as a thing.
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,”
Once I was a tall boyish girl who liked math - which, much as it was a field dominated by men, struck me even more so as a field dominated by middlers, by which I mean that in the aggregate its people seemed more androgynous than the general population.
The representation of a thing could seem more alluring than the thing itself.
Does the value lie in what he’s writing down or in this moment of lucid exaltation itself, this obscure bliss?
[Conjecture] seems to me laced with optimism, a bullishness about what could, in the future, come more fully to light.
Oppression, she concludes, doesn’t foster a spirit of rebellion but a kind of docile slavery. And one’s inner life, she writes in her notebook, is merely a kind of temptation.
It’s not the knowledge itself, not consummation but the mood, the excitement when you are on the verge of grasping.
[University-level algebra] was beautiful. I’m ambivalent about expressing it that way —“beauty” in math and science is something people tend to honor rather vaguely and pompously—instead maybe I should say that still, it was very cool.... A quality of both good literature and good mathematics is that they may lead you to a result that is wholly surprising yet seems inevitable once you’ve been shown the way, so that—aha!—you become newly aware of connections you didn’t see before.
The material of mathematical art is a metaphor, and to what does it correspond?
I could conceive of what I did in college [Math] not as a random detour but as a specialized kind of writing.
Even as mathematics presents itself from afar as an austere architecture dreamed up by singular geniuses, up close it’s a torrent of transmissions, teachers lecturing, college kids trying to solve problems together, colleagues at conferences, André writing to his sister. 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 even begin to wonder whether (or conjecture that) the desire
for mathematical revelation, the wish to dwell in a perfect, abstract world, is secretly, unconsciously twinned by another desire for communion.
The mathematicians’ view of the past tended to be slanted by, and served to reinforce, the Platonic ideal of math as an eternal structure somehow immune to historical forces.
Quotes:
The unknown as a thing.
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,”
Once I was a tall boyish girl who liked math - which, much as it was a field dominated by men, struck me even more so as a field dominated by middlers, by which I mean that in the aggregate its people seemed more androgynous than the general population.
The representation of a thing could seem more alluring than the thing itself.
Does the value lie in what he’s writing down or in this moment of lucid exaltation itself, this obscure bliss?
[Conjecture] seems to me laced with optimism, a bullishness about what could, in the future, come more fully to light.
Oppression, she concludes, doesn’t foster a spirit of rebellion but a kind of docile slavery. And one’s inner life, she writes in her notebook, is merely a kind of temptation.
It’s not the knowledge itself, not consummation but the mood, the excitement when you are on the verge of grasping.
[University-level algebra] was beautiful. I’m ambivalent about expressing it that way —“beauty” in math and science is something people tend to honor rather vaguely and pompously—instead maybe I should say that still, it was very cool.... A quality of both good literature and good mathematics is that they may lead you to a result that is wholly surprising yet seems inevitable once you’ve been shown the way, so that—aha!—you become newly aware of connections you didn’t see before.
The material of mathematical art is a metaphor, and to what does it correspond?
I could conceive of what I did in college [Math] not as a random detour but as a specialized kind of writing.
Even as mathematics presents itself from afar as an austere architecture dreamed up by singular geniuses, up close it’s a torrent of transmissions, teachers lecturing, college kids trying to solve problems together, colleagues at conferences, André writing to his sister. 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 even begin to wonder whether (or conjecture that) the desire
for mathematical revelation, the wish to dwell in a perfect, abstract world, is secretly, unconsciously twinned by another desire for communion.
The mathematicians’ view of the past tended to be slanted by, and served to reinforce, the Platonic ideal of math as an eternal structure somehow immune to historical forces.
September 10, 2020
Karen Olsson attempts, through a series of vignettes about her own life, Simone and Andre Weill, and adjacent mathematicians, to reformulate the mysticism of mathematics. In mysticism, we find wisdom, spirituality, and meaning. Olsson transmutes these principles from the world of mathematics into a world that the lay person can understand by describing and imagining a mathematical world with feelings.
In essence, she seeks to answer her question: “What is it about these bygone thinkers, these dead mathematicians, that captures me?” Often, she imagines these mathematicians working, pacing, thinking, writing, and dreaming in ways that not only help convey their lives, but also explore her intrigue with them.
Thematically, Olsson considers the pursuit of truth, of unfounded obsession, of a lofty intellectual world beyond her or her audiences comprehension. She juxtaposes her character of Simone Weil as a similar soul, someone devoted to those same pursuits but stuck behind the boundary of greater mathematical genius. Simone’s seeming madness personifies a terrible frustration the average person feels when this boundary cannot be crossed.
Her struggle with math becomes the central theme of the book - the relevance of mathematics to the normal person. As when Simone attempted to tease out from Andre what the point of his work is, Andre could not communicate the tangible benefits that Simone sought. But still, Simone was obsessed with it. The beauty, the mysticism, the interconnectedness of seemingly random topics - it is a modernist lens through which God and meaning is attainable in the structure of logic. This seems to be the primary appeal that Olsson settles on for Simone. For herself, she presents it as a continuing struggle.
The themes and presentation of the characters form a clever, cohesive delivery for Olsson’s fascination with mathematics. However, the digressions distracted me and left me feeling depressed. The negativity reminded me of writing that is harsh and bleak, not because there is some purpose, but because harsh words and sad stories sound better. My complaint about the thematic resolution is similar. I do not know, as someone who might be at the liminal boundary of mathematics, how to proceed. Olsson probably feels similarly, or even hints at some way forward, but leaves the threads untied and leaves much potential on the table.
In essence, she seeks to answer her question: “What is it about these bygone thinkers, these dead mathematicians, that captures me?” Often, she imagines these mathematicians working, pacing, thinking, writing, and dreaming in ways that not only help convey their lives, but also explore her intrigue with them.
Thematically, Olsson considers the pursuit of truth, of unfounded obsession, of a lofty intellectual world beyond her or her audiences comprehension. She juxtaposes her character of Simone Weil as a similar soul, someone devoted to those same pursuits but stuck behind the boundary of greater mathematical genius. Simone’s seeming madness personifies a terrible frustration the average person feels when this boundary cannot be crossed.
Her struggle with math becomes the central theme of the book - the relevance of mathematics to the normal person. As when Simone attempted to tease out from Andre what the point of his work is, Andre could not communicate the tangible benefits that Simone sought. But still, Simone was obsessed with it. The beauty, the mysticism, the interconnectedness of seemingly random topics - it is a modernist lens through which God and meaning is attainable in the structure of logic. This seems to be the primary appeal that Olsson settles on for Simone. For herself, she presents it as a continuing struggle.
The themes and presentation of the characters form a clever, cohesive delivery for Olsson’s fascination with mathematics. However, the digressions distracted me and left me feeling depressed. The negativity reminded me of writing that is harsh and bleak, not because there is some purpose, but because harsh words and sad stories sound better. My complaint about the thematic resolution is similar. I do not know, as someone who might be at the liminal boundary of mathematics, how to proceed. Olsson probably feels similarly, or even hints at some way forward, but leaves the threads untied and leaves much potential on the table.
July 10, 2021
As a mathematician, I was familiar with the work of Andre Weil. He was a founder and early leader of the Bourbaki group, mathematicians that worked together and published under the name Nicolas Bourbaki. Weil also developed many significant results on his own, some of his conjectures, statements of belief that were at that time unproven, led others to make significant advancements in mathematics. Hence, the origin of the title.
Weil also had a brilliant sister named Simone, she was a first-rate philosopher known for her approaches often based on mysticism. She was also a very left-wing political radical, promoting Marxism and even joining the forces of the Spanish Republic during the Civil War. While she used a gun, her eyesight was so poor that her fellow soldiers did not let her participate. Very early in the thirties, she concluded that the fascists would rise to power in Germany. The author is a novelist that graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics.
The book takes a disjointed three-track approach to explaining the lives and achievements of three people, Andre and Simone Weil as well as herself. Structurally, there is a segment on one person, shifting to a segment about another and then to the third. The only real connections are the sibling relationship between the Weils as well as when the author studied their work.
Despite this seeming convolution, Olsson pulls off an excellent rendition of a popular work on mathematics. The reader learns many things about Simone, a dynamic woman of strong opinions that did not hesitate to express them forcefully. She is said to be one of the few people that was ever able to hold their own in a debate with Leon Trotsky.
This is a great book, there is some mathematics, but the real topic is how three people worked their way through complicated issues in their pursuit of personal and professional goals.
Weil also had a brilliant sister named Simone, she was a first-rate philosopher known for her approaches often based on mysticism. She was also a very left-wing political radical, promoting Marxism and even joining the forces of the Spanish Republic during the Civil War. While she used a gun, her eyesight was so poor that her fellow soldiers did not let her participate. Very early in the thirties, she concluded that the fascists would rise to power in Germany. The author is a novelist that graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics.
The book takes a disjointed three-track approach to explaining the lives and achievements of three people, Andre and Simone Weil as well as herself. Structurally, there is a segment on one person, shifting to a segment about another and then to the third. The only real connections are the sibling relationship between the Weils as well as when the author studied their work.
Despite this seeming convolution, Olsson pulls off an excellent rendition of a popular work on mathematics. The reader learns many things about Simone, a dynamic woman of strong opinions that did not hesitate to express them forcefully. She is said to be one of the few people that was ever able to hold their own in a debate with Leon Trotsky.
This is a great book, there is some mathematics, but the real topic is how three people worked their way through complicated issues in their pursuit of personal and professional goals.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews