About The Author
Born in Mumbai in 1967, Chandrashekhar B. Khare studied Mathematics at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology. Starting out as a mathematics researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, he later taught at universities in the United States. Khare was awarded the coveted Fermat Prize in 2007 for the landmark proof of Serre's conjecture, working alongside the French mathematician, Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. In 2011, they jointly received the prestigious Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society. Khare won the Infosys Prize in 2010, and in 2012, was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society. Khare is currently the chair of the mathematics department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is married to a doctor and they have two children.
About The Book
A conjecture is like an unfulfilled fantasy in the world of pure mathematics where the most fantastic things happen routinely. Proving a conjecture is like trying to make a fantasy come true, and it can consume a mathematician for years, just as the effort to produce a great work of fiction, music or art can take over the life of its creator. This unusual, beguiling memoir is about such a journey. It begins with a child growing up in Mumbai, fascinated by mathematics, and ends with a man, just turned 40, winning a prestigious prize for proving, with a fellow-traveller, one of the most important conjectures in number theory the branch of mathematics that studies whole numbers. In this compelling account, Khare illuminates a quest that might seem impossibly esoteric to the outsider, but seen through his eyes, becomes palpably real and human. At its core, this is a book about the creative process; the mysterious ways by which ideas arise in the mind and take flight, amid many false starts and obstacles. While this undoubtedly requires solitude, a lot of the action also takes place in a delightfully collaborative atmosphere, across continents, which Khare evokes vividly. Paraphrasing a famous mathematician, Khare says, 'It is the person and not the method who solves a mathematical problem.' So, appropriately, this book is also about a person, most poignantly about a man navigating the push and pull of creative ambition while trying to fulfil personal commitments such as wanting to be with his ill mother in Mumbai.
Introduction
I am a number theorist, which means I think about questions related to what seem like the simplest of all things: the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ... To say that something is straightforward, one says that it is as easy as one, two, three. And yet, the emergence of numbers is considered a major breakthrough in human civilization. Numbers allowed us to understand the world in powerful new ways. Numbers abstract and make precise and quantify our notions of size and numerousness. The number two is an abstraction and captures what is common between all pairs of things: two apples, two chairs, two horses. Number theorists look at 1, 2, 3, ... for their own sake, and are tantalized by simple-sounding questions about them, whose answers often lie very deep. Some of the hardest questions in mathematics are about the natural numbers. A mathematician can obsess over these questions for years. Collectively, they have driven mathematical work over hundreds of years. Once lured into thinking about an innocent-looking question, one is hooked and can't let go of it - the more one understands its difficulty, the less one is able to move away from it. A wonderful example of such a question is one posed by Pierre de Fermat in the seventeenth century.
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