The Weil Conjectures

May 15, 2019
An odd but appealing combination of memoir and biography of two significant French sibling intellectuals, André Weil (1906-1998) and Simone Weil (1909-1943). Novelist and former Texas Observer editor Olsson (All the Houses, 2015, etc.) admits that her life, viewed on its own, might not suffice for a memoir. Seemingly marked for a career in the humanities, she entered Harvard and was drawn to the concrete, right-or-wrong nature of mathematics. At that time in life, she notes, "so much is up in the air, open to question, unreliable. I think part of what I liked about math, she writes, "was simply that it seemed like a sure thing, as sure as a thing could be, a solid mass of true and rigorous and irreproachable knowledge that I could grab like a pole on a bus." The author held her own and graduated but chose to pursue a career in journalism while never losing her fascination with creativity, the epitome of which is the abstract purity of mathematics. Stirred by reading the Weil memoirs, letters between the two, and a series of internet lectures by a Harvard mathematics professor, Olsson delivers a mixture of philosophy with an account of their lives and her own. Simone was an activist, philosopher, and later mystic, little known during her short life but immensely influential to the postwar generation. Her intense sympathy for the oppressed was accompanied by an obsession with sharing their suffering (working at miserable jobs; semistarvation), ineffectual, often self-destructive efforts to help, and much introspection. She was close to her brother, a brilliant mathematician who often responded to her appeals to explain his work. The responses were no more comprehensible to Olsson than Simone, but they encouraged her to muse about the nature of creativity and write this unique meditation. An occasionally rambling but effective dual biography.

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June 1, 2019
In this love letter to the lure of math, novelist Olsson (All the Houses, 2015) intertwines memoir with a dual biography of philosopher Simone Weil and her mathematician brother, Andr�. Beginning with three-year old Simone babbling on an operating table while a doctor removes her appendix, Olsson persistently places readers in the presence of her protagonists, from a Finnish prison cell with Andr�, whose mathematical formulas are mistaken for a Russian spy's code, to her own home, where she watches all the lectures from a Harvard math class filmed in 2003 and available on YouTube. Olsson avoids complex theories and equations in favor of reflections on the magic of numbers and how math can enrapture curious minds. Simone serves as a stand-in for the non-expert reader, eager to understand but uncertain about the value of inquiry so abstracted from daily life. Olsson recounts letters in which Simone presses her brother to explain what he does so that it will be clear to non-specialists. He resists, but The Weil Conjectures takes up the charge.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)