...alluring ... the philosophy, math, psychology, history, esoterica, and tantalizing impressions...is artfully offered up in the service of an original and revealing portrayal of a famous mathematician (André Weil, 1906-1998) and his even more famous philosopher-activist sister (Simone Weil, 1909-1943) ... Yes, it can get dizzying at times. Perhaps that’s Olsson’s larger point. Even so, in her exquisitely written narrative, she does a thought-provoking job of juxtaposing the life and logic of the brother, André (the 'last universal mathematician'), and the sister, Simone (the 'quasi-canonized' genius) ... In her conjectural, juxtapositional, and occasional dreamlike zigzags down the corridors of the inner lives of André and Simone Weil, Karen Olsson entices her more attentive readers to join in the joy of thinking, albeit with creative abandon in search of those hidden proofs that linger just beyond the next subway stop of our imaginations.
...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.
Karen Olsson paints vivid portraits of both siblings ... she invites the reader to sit with the Weils, to appreciate their relationship and ponder what their lives and work say to contemporary writers and mathematicians. The book is not a biography of either Weil or a detailed look at any of André’s math, which was what I was expecting to some degree based on the title. It is more impressionistic than that, with Olsson weaving other historical vignettes and her own relationship to math and writing in with the story of the Weils ... The book feels deliberately fragmentary ... The quick changes can cause a little bit of whiplash and could probably have been deployed a bit more sparingly. On the other hand, some of her insights about the process of writing or mathematics are sharper for having been juxtaposed so closely with relevant parts of the Weils’ story.
... the story of André and Simone Weil has the quality of a fairy tale—not the chirpy Disney kind but the Brothers Grimm kind. It’s disturbing and strange ... Ms. Olsson is enthralled. Drawing on the Weils’ writings and letters, she traces their intellectual tug of war as it played out against the backdrop of war-torn Europe. But this isn’t a biography in the traditional mold. Ms. Olsson, a journalist and novelist, layers in reflections on the history of mathematics and the nature of the unknown. The story builds with the poetry and precision of a theorem, shifting intermittently into memoir as her quest to understand the Weils recalls her own youthful obsession with math ... one longs for Ms. Olsson to pursue her intriguing theory a little further ... How does gender alter the equation of genius, the search for truth?
Karen Olsson’s beguiling new book, The Weil Conjectures, arrives as a corrective [to the idea that math is boring], describing mathematics—its focus, abstraction, odd hunches, blazing epiphanies—as a powerful intoxicant, a door to euphoria ... The book unfurls effortlessly, loose and legato. There are no real revelations—the subjects are well known and long dead. There are no stakes; there is no suspense. I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge ... The glamour of mathematics is what excites her, its colorful stories. The book advances in fragments, historical divagations that drift by, smoothly as clouds ... For all of Olsson’s skill at untangling knotty mathematics, she is baffled by Simone, insensible to her charisma and put off by her prose ... It is a freakish version of the thinker she offers us, a gaunt catastrophe in wide skirts ... 'Unhinged' is a crude diagnosis [for Simone], especially in a book that gives short shrift to her work and influence. From The Weil Conjectures, it’s difficult to discern how rich and various her life truly was; or to grasp her political shrewdness and the intellectual concerns ... [Olsson's] book is full of...moments of connection, combustion and surprise ... For all the riddles of mathematics, there is also the ordinary and eternal mystery of other people’s minds.
Olsson has taken on a complicated mix of subjects. The book is part memoir, part biography and part a general history of 20th-century maths. Its method is aphoristic and digressive: short sections are juxtaposed, sometimes with a kind of cumulative energy and sometimes more randomly. There were times when I longed for something more expansive, for the characters to break out of their small sections. Also I wanted to hear more about the Weils and less (or more intimately) about Olsson, whose own experiences as detailed here are rather less profound than those of her subjects. But this ordinariness does have the advantage of making her an everywoman guide, and what she does brilliantly is to explain the maths clearly and often fascinatingly. Also, and this must be unique among accounts of the Weils, she creates a vivid sense of Simone grappling with the maths alongside us.
...an experimental, tantalizing hybrid of biography, memoir, and meditation ... Digression, the organizing principle of this book, is the temptation of the intellectually adventurous and inquisitive, who will binge on Olsson’s bracing prose ... what she and any reader can envy is the 'lucid exaltation' attained by immersion in a discipline such as pure mathematics. It is not necessary to be fluent in Diophantine equations, Hilbert spaces, and Fourier analysis—or even André Weil’s conjectures—in order to read The Weil Conjectures, a book ecstatic with intimations rather than mere equations.
In this love letter to the lure of math...Olsson persistently places readers in the presence of her protagonists ... Olsson avoids complex theories and equations in favor of reflections on the magic of numbers and how math can enrapture curious minds. Simone serves as a stand-in for the non-expert reader, eager to understand but uncertain about the value of inquiry so abstracted from daily life. Olsson recounts letters in which Simone presses her brother to explain what he does so that it will be clear to non-specialists. He resists, but The Weil Conjectures takes up the charge.
