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This book is a rarity: a comprehensive survey, with rigor, yet gentle and welcoming to the amateur. The writing is wonderful. One oddity: I keep looking for a
by logjam 18y ago
This book is a rarity: a comprehensive survey, with rigor, yet gentle and welcoming to the amateur. The writing is wonderful.
One oddity: I keep looking for a mention of Paul Erdos in the book, and haven't found one.
- gjm11 18y agoPage 338, in connection with the "elementary" proof of the prime number theorem. (I searched for "Selberg" using Amazon's search-inside feature, because I don't know how that feature treats accents. But, actually, it turns out that it treats them sensibly; searching for "Erdos" turns up 17 matches.)
- logjam 18y agoI appreciate that...my search was the old fashioned way: reading the text, and looking in the index! I must be just going blind as well as dumb.
- kqr2 18y agoTimothy Gowers has an Erdos number of 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdos_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdos_number http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/William-Timothy-Gowers http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/William-Timothy-Gow...
- RiderOfGiraffes 18y agoI didn't believe you, but I've been and checked. Even though he was supervised by Bollobas (Erdos Number 1) he appears never to have co-authored with him, an unusual situation. So it seems that my Erdos Number is smaller than his - perhaps I should offer to co-author a paper with him. I'd get the kudos of co-authoring with a Fields Medal winner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal ) and he'd lower his Erdos Number to 3.
- logjam 18y agoInteresting....my Erdos number is 4 too, but I'm in a different field. There are long math tentacles into the world. Thanks to Gowers et al for this fabulous book!