杏吧原创

Keith Devlin, mathematician

On your waiting-to-read shelf? 鈥淚 rarely read books not connected with my research or my own writing.鈥 This is not restrictive, he says, 鈥渟ince both my research and writing span broad areas, and the books pile grows faster than I can deplete it鈥. He even wrote about The Da Vinci Code (Bantam, 2003). How was it? 鈥淢ichael Brown can tell a good story in a formulaic fashion,鈥 he says. 鈥淏ut I found his terse, breathless style annoying, and persevered because I had agreed to write about it.鈥 Devlin reckons Brown got about half of the maths wrong, 鈥渁lmost certainly because he used popular sources on the golden ratio that repeatedly do the same鈥. What鈥檚 next? The New Brain by Richard Restak (Rodale, 2003). 鈥淢y colleagues tell me it鈥檚 a must-read.鈥

Devlin鈥檚 latest book is The Millennium Problems (Granta).

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