I've always been quite interested in mathematics. I enjoyed it at school and took it as part of my degree. I've since forgotten most of it, but have played around with mathematical recreations like the Mandelbrot set, simple 3D graphics and other subjects on various computers. I'm also into public key encryption that involves large prime numbers.

It seems there are some theorems regarding primes that can never be solved just by calculating them on computers. One of these is the Riemann hypothesis. It's been around for nearly 150 and not been solved. This book is about the history of the man and his mathematics. It alternates chapters between the history and the theory, so you can choose to just read one or the other.

The technical stuff is fairly heavy and I don't claim to understand all of it, but it introduced me to some new areas of mathematics. The history is fairly well told, but mathematicians are not generally the most exciting of people. I'll probably read it again some time to try and absorb more. I think this one is reserved for those who are into mathematics rather than history buffs.

I'm now reading a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci.

You will notice a lot of links in this article to Wikipedia. It's a very addictive site. I'd like a plug-in for my blogging tool that could add these links automatically. Maybe I should write one.