Jack Dikian

The clerk and the accounts department Jack Dikian

Kurt Friedrich Gödel, Alan Mathison Turing, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, Andrew John Wiles and John Forbes Nash; Six men of the 20th century whose stories are of the great romantic tales of mathematics. An account of triumph and tragedy, of men of genius, baring intellectual brilliance and tenacity. They prevailed against incredible adversity and whose lives, in the case of two cut short at the height of their powers. These men proved Fermat's Last Theorem, solved the Poincaré conjecture whilst shunning acclaim and prize. Discovered the extraordinary connection, the partition function, Pi and nontrivial patterns in modular arithmetic. One developed a machine that helped break the German Enigma, another invented Game theory, making economics a practical endeavour. Gödel proved that the mathematical methods in place since the time of Euclid inadequate for discovering all that is true about the natural numbers.