Quotes from book
Prime Obsession

Name: Prime Obsession
Author: John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire

Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics is a historical book on mathematics by John Derbyshire, detailing the history of the Riemann hypothesis, named for Bernhard Riemann, and some of its applications.

“Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.””

John Derbyshire book Prime Obsession

Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003)

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