RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...mathematics, fiction, speculation, brilliance, biography, hardship, mockery, intimidation, solidarity, generosity, and moral and theoretical imagination — run throughout the book, making it one of the most insightful meditations on modern mathematics I have ever read. With startling originality, Olsson confronts the problem of knowing mathematics from the outside. In the process, she vividly portrays the human dimensions of mathematical creativity ... This book is not a fable, but it pithily prods the moral dimensions of legends. Nor is it a biography or memoir, though it probes the Weils’ lives and the author’s own, weaving them into an account of what it means to grapple with mathematics. It is not history, but it mines the past for evocative stories ... Olsson ultimately makes the case for conjecture as its own literary genre ... Olsson’s conjecturing is so effective in part because she reckons so frankly with what it means to comprehend mathematics as a nonmathematician, an endeavor she finds by turns thrilling and fascinating, frustrating and alienating ... More than just about any mathematician in the 20th century, Weil stood for the power of mathematicians to make their own worlds, to insist that others join them there, and to pursue those worlds until they harmonized with our own. This kind of radical imagination, Olsson shows, is not just mathematical but also moral, and it offers a key to the intellectual history of the 20th century.
