Publisher's Synopsis
“Beautiful and enigmatic, Karen Olsson's book draws us to the brink of spiritual and mathematical genius, to the edge of a field “between knowing and not knowing”, to the verge of an audacious conjecture. The Weil Conjectures is a story of brilliant siblings – one philosopher, one mathematician – who spent their lives at the service of the unattainable. In haunting prose, Olsson asks us to remember, in the words of Simone Weil, that “the eternal part of the soul feeds on hunger”. A true achievement” – John Kaag, author of Hiking with Nietzsche
Simone Weil: famous French philosopher, writer, political activist, mystic - and sister to André, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. For Karen Olsson, who studied mathematics at Harvard only to turn to writing as a vocation, the lives and obsessions of these two extraordinary siblings returned her to the intellectual passions of her youth.
When Olsson got hold of the 1940 letters between Simone and André, she discovered that André's pursuit of his studies became increasingly incomprehensible to his sister, leading to Simone directly questioning him about the value of such rarefied knowledge as it applied to the lived experience. Struck by this conflict, Olsson revisits her own time at university, how she came to be consumed by mathematics, and the unexpected similarities that can be found between two seemingly opposed subjects. At the core of the book lies her curiosity about the inception of creative thought - that flash of insight - experienced by writers and mathematicians alike.
A rare work of non-fiction that intricately weaves together biography, memoir, history and philosophy, and written with prose of precision and poetic lucidity, The Weil Conjectures is nothing short of a complete seduction in the art of mathematics, and the mysterious nature of scientific and creative thought.
