The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown by Karen Olsson

The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown Reviews

• 
  Ryan Croke

  I am a mathematician. At least, I have a PhD in math. This book was a great reminder of why I study what I study. It's a compulsion. There is something different about mathematics; something timeless and irritatingly beautiful.
  
  I saw this book more of a love letter to mathematics than anything else. The throughput is the fascination with mathematics and the world which it takes you too.
  
  Great book, thanks for the reminder.
• 
  Bridget

  One of those books that makes you feel as if the numinous is almost palpable, for once.
  
  Simone Weil is a historical, almost mythic figure who keeps recurring in my life. If you do not know who she is, here is a representative tidbit: though frail, she was intent upon parachuting herself down onto the front lines of World War II in order to heal soldiers (and, more importantly, martyr herself). I do seek her out myself, yes, but she also pops up independently. It made perfect sense to find an advanced reader's copy of this book by chance on my workplace book cart.
  
  I absolutely loved the process of getting through the book. I am in awe of both Weil siblings now, and have reestablished my high school appreciation of math, though I barely understood what Andre Weil was getting at with his conjectures. What Simone was getting at, whatever it was, though much more numinous, is more important to me. But the fascinating thing is that Olsson was able to illuminate so much more of Simone's impassioned spiritual thinking by way of sketching out her brother's much more grounded intelligence.
  
  Olsson has an acute sense of the way to make non-fiction historical events feel present and visible. I particularly loved the way she would question her own aim metafictionally within the text. Even though it was a memoir, it felt autofictional, because so much of it was immersive. I'm grateful for the communion of this text.
• 
  Jason Stanford

  My friend Karen Olsson wrote a book I want to tell you about. It’s about math.
  
  Wait! Don’t fall asleep! Really. I’m serious. Give me a second. Honestly, if you were here for my disquisition on Jason Statham’s dives in The Meg you can damn well sit through me geeking out a little bit about a clever book written by someone I’ve found out is far smarter than I ever hoped to be. Also, there’s barely any math, which is how I understood it.
  
  One thing I learned from Olsson’s book is the extent to which math is just a bunch of symbols meant to represent abstract concepts about truth. Numbers exist but are only imagined. The representation of a thing is not the thing, but that doesn’t mean the representation is not its own thing.
  
  A good example of a representation becoming its own thing is the device you might be reading this on. People have entire relationships with other people without meeting them in the flesh. We can literally read each other’s thoughts in the digitized word and hear the author’s authentic voice. This is the online corollary to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle*, for if we can never truly determine where a particle is in time and space then it follows we are all to some extent abstractions to each other, though it doesn’t make us any less real.
  
  We think of our relationship with abstractions as a new thing, but Olsson points out that novels were, at one time, novel, which ushered in “a new awareness of the inner self.”
  
  Distant objects or people, represented by symbols on a page: we are so accustomed to this that it’s hard to conceive of a time when it was a new phenomenon. Carson compares this representing, the conjuring of things by written words, to the way that a lover constructs a mental image of an absent beloved. Desire spans the difference between the abstract thought and the actual person. Everything is triangulated—the lover, the beloved, the image. The writer, the thing, the word.
  
  And then ability to relate to an abstraction led to the expansion of what could be abstracted.
  
  According to one scholar’s thesis, it was the invention of writing that gave rise to number and an abstract concept. The pre-historic people of the ancient Near East, exchanging sheep or grain, originally recorded what they’d traded using clay tokens that represented the thing traded; in time they began storing the tokens in a type of envelope, marking the envelope to designate what was inside of it. Eventually they dispensed with the tokens, in favor of the marks.
  
  The representation becomes the thing, and “we must love that which does not exist,” as Olsson quotes from Simone Weil’s writings. Much of Olsson’s memoir focuses on the relationship between two real-life siblings, Simone and André Weil. Simone, as is familiar to anyone who was especially moody and intellectual in high school, was a philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Her older, less-famous brother came up with the Weil conjectures, which apparently provided the framework of modern algebraic geometry and number theory. In math, he’s apparently a big deal, which is like your band having a hit song in Denmark or you having a girlfriend in Canada. It’s real, in theory.
  
  I met Karen Olsson because she wrote one of my favorite political novels about Austin (Waterloo: A Novel), and I invited her to speak to a group I belonged to. Then, not wanting to rush into a successful career as a novelist, she wrote All the Houses: A Novel a decade later. Both are good and deserve more attention.
  
  Perhaps wanting to push the throttle a little more, she started on another novel soon after All the Houses that included Simone and André as characters. The novel was not working, so she rescued the Weil siblings from that literary no man’s land and constructed around them The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, a dreamlike garden of a memoir about her fascination with math.
  
  She writes about what she clearly sees as her failure as a math major at Harvard as climbing a sand dune that kept getting taller, but she clearly knows the subject. She describes the field as a series of failed paths from conjecture to proof until one finds the way to the truth. It’s all about how math requires abstractions to get from blueprint to construction, a good enough metaphor for the success of this, her third book.
  
  Buy it. It’s good.
• 
  Jim Coughenour

  I seem to be less impressed with this book than other reviewers. It is as much about Karen Olsson as André and Simone Weil, allegedly about an "obsession" with mathematics but in fact it's something less, something more ordinary like the effort of making sense of one's life. Nothing wrong with that, but as is the case with most of us, it's not especially compelling.
  
  My chief grumble is that the book really doesn't tell us much about the Weil siblings. We get a sketch of their biography, and a superficial sense of André's contribution to mathematics. Simone comes off as a complete nutcase, which perhaps she was, but she was also capable of sustained brilliance. There's almost nothing here that conveys the power and passion of what she actually wrote.
  
  Simone pestered André to describe his mathematical discoveries. He responded: "Telling nonspecialists of my research or of any other mathematical research, it seems to me, is like explaining a symphony to a deaf person. It could be attempted, you could talk of images and themes, of sad harmonies or triumphant dissonances, but in the end what would you have? A kind of poem, good or bad, unrelated to the thing it pretends to describe." That well conveys my own impression of this book.
• 
  David

  I loved Karen Olsson's first book,
  Waterloo, a 2005 novel about Austin, Texas. I read it just as I was moving here to Austin to live, in 2021. Soon after, I joined a book group, which consisted largely of people who had recently moved here. Members accepted my suggestion to read Waterloo. Honor required that I lead the discussion. I contacted Olsson and, to my surprise, she agreed to appear, via Zoom, at the meeting of our book group. She was charming. At the end of the discussion, I thought I would give a little plug for her new book (i.e., this one), so I asked if you could understand the book if you didn't know more than average about math. She said you could.
  
  I have read the book now, and can confirm that this is true. As a matter of fact, a lot of the book is about the author's failed attempts to understand various bits of esoteric math, which made me feel better about my ignorance. (Also, a lot of the book is about Simone Weil and the Weil family, no math knowledge required.)
  
  However, many names of incomprehensible math things are named. Usually, I would, in a Goodreads review, list them and provide links to either the Wikipedia entry or some other explanatory web page, to help readers coming after me. However, having attempted for a few hours to find such pages, I state without fear of contradiction that reading about these things will be of little use, except to confirm that most of us will never, ever, understand them. However, I hate to let a good list go to waste, so here they are, without links: Diophantine equations, unitary operations in Hilbert spaces, ergodic hypothesis, Dedekind's generalization of the Riemann zeta function, Brouwer fixed-point theorem, Letschetz fixed-point theorem, homotopy theory, Sylow theorems, Riemann surfaces.
  
  However, there is a pop-culture music reference that I may assist you with, in case you are as completely clueless as I am about the tunes that the cool kids are listening to. On page 179, Olsson writes about Simone Weil: “Having written so relentlessly and died so young, she acquired, after death, the burnish of genius cut short, an Elliott Smith for the Partisan Review set.” Elliott who? See Wikipedia entry
  here.
  
  (For a recent arrival in Austin like me, passing references to music and musicians too cool to have made an impression where I used to live are a routine occurrence.)
  
  The book reads a little like the writer started a more conventional “non-fiction novel” about the Weil family, and also started a more conventional memoir, and then decided to splice them together. I hope that doesn't seem like a put-down – it's not meant to be.
  
  Frankly, Simone Weil (in common with all of her family) seemed like she was easier to read about than to actually experience first hand. However, like a lot of smart but difficult people, she was often nattering on about discomforting stuff that the rest of us are more comfortable ignoring: “Surely Simone Weil, as odd as some of her beliefs and proposals were, was right to emphasize the importance of sustained attention, which is something we are letting slip away, or really giving away, with little more than mild, fleeting second thoughts” (p. 99).
  
  I enjoyed this book, but I generally enjoy eccentric and personal books. It gave me a relaxed and enjoyable way to learn about things I didn't know so much about.
  
  I received an electronic copy of this book as a birthday present from the Long Suffering Wife.
• 
  Cameron Averill

  This book ended up very special to me. Like the author, I majored in math (well, history, too) as an undergrad. Like the author, I felt like the beauty of the subject was always just beyond reach, but also felt like I got a glimpse of it when I fiddled with my Abstract Algebra problem sets. I’ve never found myself highlighting, and lingering on, so many passages as I did reading this book.
  
  The style of the book is unique, not so much logical or argumentative as it is poetic. Readers who like this book will love Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and vice-versa. Readers who hate this book will hate Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and vice-versa.
  
  I enjoyed reading about the Weils, but felt like Simone got the short end of the stick at times. The last thing Olsson says about her is that she was “unhinged.” Still, this book was nothing short of magical for me, if only because the author and I seem to have much in common.
• 
  Cate Tedford

  Woahhh. Cool book. I've never read something structured in exactly this fashion. The structure is fascinating and, at times, confusing, but it kept me on my toes. A lot of the math stuff went right over my head, as expected. I loved getting to learn more about the life and ideas of Simone Weil, along with her twin brother, André, and consequently, see into the mind of the author. I still don't know how to properly pronounce "Weil" though...
  
  "The idea that math is immortal, that its discoveries accumulate over time but that its truths are outside of time, is implicit in its everyday language of theorem and proof, all those statements made in the eternal present tense. But how can that be? How can math be timeless even as everything that underlies it--the historically specific ways that concepts are described, manipulated, and proved--shifts over the years?
  
  Proof, that seeming ironclad warranty, is at the end of the day a rhetorical device, a method of persuading others of your conclusion. Proof in itself is hardly immune to history. It has evolved over the centuries, finding different means of expression in adhering to different standards of rigor.
  
  But then again, I’m not going to sit here and say that math is not timeless."
• 
  Matt

  What an odd duck this book is. I'm not sure I've read anything quite like it.
  
  Prima facie, it's a biographical reflection on the lives of the Andre and Simone Weil, a 20th Century French sibling pair who survived the war and achieved notoriety. But the author is a novelist at heart, and not only does the book read like a novel, the author also inserts her own foray into math education into the work and firmly solidifies herself as the third focal point in the story. There are other characters, diversions in the story, but you really follow these three people.
  
  It's a curious strategy, and it kind of works. For any mortal reader who has flirted with a math education, the author is the figure in the book that becomes the most relatable. Indeed, the author makes only the slightest attempt to relate Andre Weil's contributions to the field of mathematics. It works because she is a very good writer and she captures this flirtation in verse.
  
  I experienced then, experienced from time to time, a kind of pleasure that came only after having thought hard about math, the mental equivalent of having gone for a long run. A gentle euphoria.
  
  As a teenager I always felt the ground moving under my feet, and there was something fixed and unassailable about math.
  
  When it was discovered that the whole numbers couldn't fully account for even simple geometric relationships, the Greeks had to start over, he writes, at the foot of the hill. Since one could no longer be sure of anything.
  
  Andre is the brilliant mathematician, and he achieves fame with his attempts to relate the fields of topology and number theory. But it is Simone who steals the story with her asceticism and her idealism. I think the author particularly related to Simone, who also saw in mathematics the potential to bring order to a chaotic world.
  
  Simone "thinks she might receive divine wisdom from the material world the way a blind person is informed by a cane," she writes. "The universe would become an instrument. Through it she would know God."
  
  Both the author and Simone must reconcile their own very human capacities for math. Simone finds herself led to a devotion of Christian mysticism, and she dies very young by some combination of tuberculosis and self-starvation. The author is led to write this book.
  
  The overachieving B-plus student will recognize the sentiments.
• 
  Rebekah

  All my expectations of this book were upended within the first page. I was expecting, to be honest, a rather dry biographical portrait of the mathematician Andre Weil, with a tangential exploration of his relationship with his (to me, more fascinating) mystic philosopher sister, Simone. What we have instead is a formally inventive and experimental book that defies categorisation. If you have picked this up looking for a straightforward biography of the Weil siblings, this is definitely NOT the place to go! The sections on Andre and Simone are novelistic and largely non-factual; they appear here as muses conjured by Olsson to help illustrate the vast wonder and unknowability of the world. These two extreme and inexplicable geniuses spent their lives in opposition, pursuing doggedly their own private visions and matching them up to a grand teleological vision of the world that they could offer to others. I found myself completely beguiled by this bonkers little book, which is composed of short poetic fragments, a hybrid of fiction, memoir, mathematical enquiry, history and biography. Though, at the same time, it is none of these. What this book leaves you with is an appetite for knowledge, for that heady feeling of discovery when all the synapses of your brain are firing together and you are making connections, seeing the world anew, entering that magical fugue state where everything and nothing makes sense. I have always been jealous of people that are mathematically minded, because that is a method of comprehending the world that will always be closed off to me. I may never understand the beauty and importance of equations, and that saddens me. So I related a lot to Olsson's desire for mathematical knowledge, as well as her affinity for the more ineffable and spiritual pursuits of Simone. This book celebrates curiosity and intellectual quests in a way that is fresh, inventive and immersive.
  
  '"A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover's soul," she writes/ "He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before." It's not the knowledge itself, not consummation but the mood, the excitement when you are on the verge of grasping.'
  
  'Simone dreams her brother is a tooth - her own tooth, but not her own. Stuck inside her mouth and schooling her as always. She pushes at him with her tongue to wiggle him loose, although she doesn't want to be separated she still has that compulsion to dislodge him, to feel the bloody gap where he used to be.'
  
  'Anyone who is sufficiently patient may achieve a kind of transcendence, provided that he 'longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment,' she'll later write. She arrives at an idea of strenuous faith, a discipline of attention. An enlightenment always just out of reach. It's a crucial epiphany, a turning point the only way she can rescue herself, that is to say the only way she can (on her terms) lead a life that is is not worthless, is to devote herself wholly, with every ounce of her energy, to the truth - an impossible goal, really, but she would stay dedicated to it.'
• 
  Eva

  Wonderful math/philosophy biography paired with the author's own math story. I didn't know much about the Weil siblings before, now I can say I still don't understand what Andre came up with, and that I definitely would have found Simone very annoying. But this book was great.
• 
  Mary Robideaux

  This book was a little too quirky for me. I thought I might relate more to it as a long-ago math major but that didn't help. I skimmed much of the math and the author's narrative of her own love affair with math. I hope there is a magazine article out there about the Weils as their story was an interesting one that wasn't fully realized in this book.
• 
  Ella

  My favorite part of this book is how it has no citations
• 
  Mishehu

  An elegantly written book...to no particular end. TWC blends history, biography, philosophy, memoir, and fiction in telling the story of a famous pair of siblings -- one a mathematician, the other a philosopher/mystic. It's a story worth telling (that's been told before). TWC approaches it from a largely imagined perspective. As such, the veracity of much of her telling is left to question. This is, of course, forgivable; writers do have their license. But the results (to this reader at least) were less compelling than I hoped they'd be. I didn't realize, as I came to this read, that it's largely a work of fiction, loosely hung on a scaffolding of fact. But I quickly realized and accepted the conceit. For all the beauty of KO's writing and imagining, though, the Weils she presents -- brother or sister -- struck me as little more than 2-dimensional characters: stereotypes of the mathematician and the mystic. For all KO's efforts to represent the inner lives of both, she only manages to scratch the surface, giving the entirety of this slim volume an insubstantial feel. KO's reflections on mathematics, including her own long-ago math studies, and recently revived interest in the discipline resonate with my own interests, but did not make for compelling reading. And the fact that she is unable (by her own repeated admission) to give any but the most trifling account of the Weil Conjectures (what they are, why they matter, etc.) in a book of that very title is, to say the least, disappointing. I cannot fault readers who came to this book with a very different set of expectations for their own frustrations reading it. For my part, though my own expectations were also upset, I did at least enjoy KO's writing (hence, my 3-star rating). TWC is a lovely 'think-piece', just not an especially deep or memorable one. Caveat emptor...
• 
  Derek Ouyang

  This is about a pair of siblings, the older brother a famous mathematician and the younger sister an even more famous recluse. Add the author who searches for the meaning of their existence and her own, and you get a beautiful waltz between three truth-seekers -- logos, ethos, and pathos -- the mind, the soul, and the heart.
• 
  Mari

  A very interesting book and exquisite narrative. One can clearly see the nature of the two Weil siblings, André and Simone. The story of The author’s own experience with math is very enjoyable. It is an homage to Andrè, Simone, mathematics, mathematicians and decisions we make in life.
• 
  Michelle Hogmire

  Thanks to FSG for sending me a finished copy of this book last year; unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to read it until now (pbk release July 21, 2020)--
  
  I love this strange little book! It fits nicely alongside the work of Kate Zambreno and Maggie Nelson--a fact and fiction blend of historical material and the author's personal life, where meaning often comes in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate material and the white space between sections.
  
  Olsson's book focuses on the lives and work of the Weil siblings (the more well-known activist Simone and her mathematician brother Andre), along with the author's ruminations on her early fascination with math, which she studied at the college level before becoming a writer. Olsson also mines the history of the mathematical field, going all the way back to the Babylonians, for pertinent anecdotes.
  
  Of course, all of these subjects loosely cohere to form a commentary on writing and the creative life in general. In a fantastic explanation of what it's like to be a writer, Olsson admits that she didn't study enough math to be able to understand "The Weil Conjectures"--Andre's vital discovery, but also the title of her own book! She emails a professor for help, but he never responds; acknowledging that it's likely because he's busy or has a strict spam filter, Olsson also admits that she can't help but feel like he's not answering her on purpose because she's an outsider. Later, they have an awkward exchange in a grocery store, and Olsson realizes they have more in common as parents than as math experts.
  
  That's it folks, the perfect metaphor for the writing life: uncertainty, confusion, anxiety-motivated anger, misunderstanding--but it sure makes a good story.
• 
  Tracey

  "Even as mathematics presents itself from afar as an austere architecture dreamed up by singular geniuses, up close it's a torrent of transmissions... for every solitary discovery there are massive systems of relationships, which I begin to think of as a kind of giant math ant colony, or math hive, and I begin to wonder whether...the desire for mathematical revelation, the wish to dwell in a perfect, abstract world, is secretly, unconsciously twinned by another desire for communication. One the negative imprint of the other. Abstraction the flip side of love." And, according to what Olsson presents of the Weil siblings, they are negative imprints of each other. One a gifted mathematician and the other a philosophical thinker. To be clear, I am not completely sure what Olsson's purpose was in writing this book, as it is not pure biography (there's a lot of autobiography interspersed throughout the book). It's not a straightforward historical account of the Weils or mathematics (it meanders in time and place widely and frequently). Having not read Simone Weil's notebooks but having just read an account of her thought process, it would seem that perhaps Olsson is emulating Weil in form. I realized earlier today that this book might be what it's like to have a conversation with me when I am excited about a topic and I bounce from idea to idea, often returning to the starting point, but sometimes not for a long while, but in the end, it's all connected (or, I believe it is). Olsson's writing is often elegant, almost poetic, and she clearly has a passion for mathematics and philosophical thinking. Kinda right up my alley.
• 
  Ron Kurtz

  "The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown" by Karen Olsson is a difficult book to categorize. The author admits as much herself as she struggles to blend the true story of Andre Weil, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century, his tragic sister Simone, and her own fascination -- and challenges -- decoding mathematical principles. The book toggles back and forth through time (often within the same chapter), shifting its narrative between Andre and Simone, and manages to weave in her own personal story as a tourist fascinated by Algebra and the Pythagoreans, which I'm guessing she hoped might provide the necessary perspective to thread everything together. While beautifully written, I'm afraid there's too much here to tackle in such an unwieldy narrative, and though I admire her effort, it's ultimately a failed experiment. As Olsson writes, "What is it about these bygone thinkers, these dead mathematicians, that captures me? A fond reverence muddled with a strain of muted pity, a distant, tainted love: I can't exactly name this feeling and so keep resorting to their stories; I'm still trying to describe it or at least circumscribe it, and so (with apologies) I'll indulge in one more digression." And digress she does, endlessly, but in an attempt to get closer to her subject, she manages to write around it until Andre Weil and his sister and their associates become ultimately unknowable. Into this mix, she attempts to find a connection between mathematics and creativity. But she's already piled on one too many themes, and sadly, the entire structure collapses under its own weight.
• 
  Shahryar Khan

  Read this on my phone in pdf form, in tiny chunks whenever I got a few mins to spare, savouring its elegant conversational style interspersed with cool anecdotes. This was a memoir written by someone trying to process her past love affair with math, by studying the psychology of two great minds of the 20th century, a brother-sister duo, namely André and Simone Weil. The former, one of the greatest algebraic geometers of the 2nd half of the 20th century, creator of the Bourbaki group and originator of the Weil conjectures (famous conjectures, now proven, relating number theory and topology). The latter, one of the most fascinating yet enigmatic personalities of the last century, a writer, philosopher and mystic, obsessed both with the problem of human oppression and the question of transcendence. Both led very interesting lives that wove into each other's in intricate ways. This memoir was very heartfelt and insightful. Reading it often made me forget about my own surroundings and absorbed me into the complex emotional tapestry weaved by the author that was equal parts uplifting and heartbreaking. I could feel my empathy muscles growing. Increasing emotional "resolution" such that you have a moment-by-moment glimpse of the inner life of a person tends to have that effect. It expands your soul and diminishes the ego. Love this genre of memoir 💜 It's a happy balance b/w the completely fictional and completely factual. It both gave interesting facts since it was based on actual people and explored the human psyche in depth like any good novel.