Simply Riemann

Born to a poor Lutheran pastor in what is today the Federal Republic of Germany, Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) was a child math prodigy who began studying for a degree in theology before formally committing to mathematics in 1846, at the age of 20. Though he would live for only another 20 years (he died of pleurisy during a trip to Italy), his seminal work in a number of key areas--several of which now bear his name--had a decisive impact on the shape of mathematics in the succeeding century and a half. In Simply Riemann, author Jeremy Gray provides a comprehensive and intellectually stimulating introduction to Riemann's life and paradigm-defining work. Beginning with his early influences--in particular his relationship with his renowned predecessor Carl Friedrich Gauss--Gray goes on to explore Riemann's specific contributions to geometry, functions of a complex variable, prime numbers, and functions of a real variable, which opened the way to discovering the limits of the calculus. He