Bart Libert reviewed Het laatste raadsel van Fermat by Simon Singh
Good book, horrible translation
4 stars
All in all, an interesting read about an interesting subject.
However, some parts were a bit boring to me, as some of the mathematics were explained in a painstakingly oversimplified way. This is probably good for people with no mathematical background at all, but if you already know something about e.g. proof by induction, you'll probably get bored as well.
The non-mathematical parts on the other hand were a joy to read: I had heard about a lot of the mathematicians mentioned in the books, but mostly about their contributions to the science, not about their (sometimes surprisingly interesting) lives and motivations, so that part of their lives was a real joy to discover.
One last remark: the Dutch translation is terrible: it's full of mistakes that could have easily been discovered by some proofreading, it uses a lot of words and expressions that are typically only used in the …
All in all, an interesting read about an interesting subject.
However, some parts were a bit boring to me, as some of the mathematics were explained in a painstakingly oversimplified way. This is probably good for people with no mathematical background at all, but if you already know something about e.g. proof by induction, you'll probably get bored as well.
The non-mathematical parts on the other hand were a joy to read: I had heard about a lot of the mathematicians mentioned in the books, but mostly about their contributions to the science, not about their (sometimes surprisingly interesting) lives and motivations, so that part of their lives was a real joy to discover.
One last remark: the Dutch translation is terrible: it's full of mistakes that could have easily been discovered by some proofreading, it uses a lot of words and expressions that are typically only used in the Netherlands (as a native speaker from Belgium I had to look some of them up - and they were not mathematical terms!) and the worst of all: the translator obviously did not have a lot of knowledge about the subject, which is a pity for this kind of book.
So all in all: 4 stars for the book, 0 stars for the translation.
