The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented development in mathematics, as well as in all sciences: more theorems were proved and results found in a hundred years than in all of previous history. In this book, the author distills this unwieldy mass of knowledge into a fascinating and authoritative overview of the subject. He concentrates on thirty highlights of pure and applied mathematics. Each tells the story of an exciting problem, from its historical origins to its modern solution, in lively prose free of technical details. The author opens by discussing the four main philosophical foundations of mathematics of the nineteenth century and ends by describing the four most important open mathematical problems of the twenty first century. In presenting the thirty problems at the heart of the book he devotes equal attention to pure and applied mathematics, with applications ranging from physics and computer science to biology and economics. Special attention is dedicated to the famous `23 problems' outlined by David Hilbert in his address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900 as a research program for the new century, and to the work of the winners of the Fields Medal, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics.
Piergiorgio Odifreddi is a Professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Turin and has been a visiting professor at Cornell University for many years. He is the author of the text book Classical Recursion Theory. He is also a regular contributor to the Italian daily La Repubblica. Freeman Dyson, Professor, Emeritus of Physics at the Institute of Advanced Study, is the author of several books, including Disturbing the Universe.