Donal O'Shea

This was a decent book, but a bit of a hard read.

Firstly, the book introduces many concepts by name, with some short descriptions, and then goes on to discuss them in some qualitative detail; how one concept leads to another; how concepts fail to connect. For me, at least, this was difficult to follow. Granted, in order to truly understand what is being discussed, you would need to understand the mathematics; perhaps this is just an insurmountable problem in trying to translate high-level and difficult mathematics into lay-language.

Secondly, there are too many sections where names and dates and attempted proofs of such-and-such a conjecture/theory/etc. are listed; in these sections it very much feels like the only people who would be able to pull much meaning would be already quite familiar with the topics. There is much more of this in the last third or quarter of the book.

The middle 85% of the book isn't about the Poincare Conjecture per se. In this, I would describe the book as the history of mathematicians and mathematics, from ancient times to today, as told from the point of view of the Poincare Conjecture. An analogy might be something like a book that details the life of some famous figure by telling the history of their family/ancestry and the times and events their family lived through.… (altro)

This book is about a part of mathematics called topology (the word topology goes back to the 1850s, but when I was young, a century ago, it was not used: the disciplin of topology was still part of "geometry"). The good news is that you can understand the book, because I did.
Despite the subtitle "In search of the shape of the universe," it is not about physics or astronomy at all, it is a book about an interesting mathematical problem. The author Donal O'Shea succombed to the influence of his friends and tried to interest us in the subject by showing that it can be useful. Math is math: often it is useful, sometimes it is not, sometimes it becomes useful centuries after a mathemematical discovery. We got to live with that. Math is interesting in itself, like games and puzzles: it gives the brain jolts of pleasure, even if you are not a mathematician.
O'Shea does a terrible job at making topology look useful: the idea that with everything we knew about maps at the time of Columbus, we could have concluded (but we did not) that the earth is a doughnut is irritating and ludicrous. It does not help. You can skip the first chapters and start at page 21 and get to the meaty part of the thing.
What I like about the book:
1. It is a neat problem
2. I understand what the author says
3. It has a compassionate look on the fate of mathematicians, and the history part is very well done.… (altro)