Book: Prime Obsession

Mandar introduced me to the book Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire. As the name states, the book is about prime numbers; specifically about the Riemann Hypothesis. I must say I highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in number theory. Earlier, I had read another book on this topic - The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy. Although I still find The Music of the Primes interesting, I feel Prime Obsession is a much more focused attempt towards presenting the Riemann Hypothesis to a general audience. While The Music of the Primes gives a lot of biographical and interesting details of several number theorists that have attempted to crack the pattern underlying the primes over the centuries, it does not provide a detailed treatment of the Riemann Hypothesis. On the other hand, in Prime Obsession, John Derbyshire develops the background mathematics required to understand the Riemann Hypothesis in a fairly detailed manner before presenting the Riemann Hypothesis itself. As a result, apart from getting a good idea as to what the Riemann Hypothesis is all about, we also get a decent revision of quite a bit of maths.

The details of the book are as follows:

Title: Prime Obsession (Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics)
Author: John Derbyshire
ISBN: 0309085497
Pages: 450 (approx.)
Price: Around Rs. 400, I think