When We Cease to Understand the World

By Benjamin Labatut

Rating: 5/5

This is one of those books that is difficult to write about.

Mathematics and the lives of mathematicians have long been an interest of mine. To this day I will still sit down with a coffee (or wine or beer) and a calculus, physics or other book to solve problems. (Not the kind of detail to include on a dating profile.)

My admiration for math is its power. Its rigorous clarity. Even a moderate working knowledge of number will change ones perspective on life. The power of math makes subjects like business, law, and medicine appear simple. (And for reference, I’m a lawyer making a living as a financial consultant.) 

So, when I find a book like When We Cease to Understand the World, you can imagine my excitement. This book was recommended to me by friend and owner of a used book store in the town that I live. And what a wonderful recommendation it was. 

The book’s structure is unique, perhaps even odd. Short, at 188 pages [1], the actual book doesn’t start until page 87. There is even a preface on page 91. Up to then, you will have read what are best described as three essays. 

The last of these essays riveted me, as the main characters are two people I have long looked up to: the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochiziki and the legendary Alexander Grothendieck. The story that unfolds connects these two figures intimately, and I was not even aware they had ever met in person. 

If you do not know these figures, you aren’t alone. But this book is perhaps the best introduction you will ever have to their lives, and Grothendieck’s in particular, as it explains his brilliant intellect as well as his early retirement from the world of mathematics to pursue a life that is at one with the natural world. The essays on these figures end with a beautiful revelation that is almost to remarkable to be true. 

Navigate these three “essays” as I call them, and you finally arrive at a preface, and at the book itself. Immediately, you are launched into the great debates within physics in the early twentieth century: what is the nature of the quantum world? 

The main characters of the chapters that comprise the book are none other than Heisenberg, promoting his uncertainty principle, and Schrodinger with his wave functions. 

The author writes about these figures, as he does everyone in the book, in a deeply personal way. The author’s interest does not appear to be their mathematics or achievements, but to explore who these people were and perhaps to understand why they did what they did. 

And then, almost as soon as it began, you find an epilogue at page 169. But the book is far from over. The final pages are comprised of a series of six short vignettes, which feel very personal to the author, or else the author just elected to write in the first person. 

Overall, this was a wonderful book! Highest recommendation. 

 

[1] My copy was published by the New York Review of Books in 2020.