Fearless Symmetry, Revised edition Edition

“The authors are to be admired for taking a very difficult topic and making it … more accessible than it was before.”–Timothy Gowers, Nature “The authors … outline current research in mathematics and tell why it should hold interest even for people outside scientific and technological fields.”–Science News “The book … does a remarkable job in making the work it describes accessible to an audience without technical training in mathematics, while at the same time remaining faithful to the richness and power of this work. I recommend it to mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike with any interest in this subject.”–William M. McGovern, SIAM Review “Unique… [T]his book is an amazing attempt to provide to a mathematically unsophisticated reader a realistic impression of the immense vitality of this area of mathematics.”–Lindsay N. Childs, Mathematical Reviews “To borrow one of the authors’ favorite words, this book is an amazing attempt to provide to a mathematically unsophisticated reader a realistic impression of the immense vitality of this area of mathematics. But I think the book has another useful role. With a very broad brush, it paints a beautiful picture of one of the main themes of the Langlands program.”–Lindsay N. Childs, MathSciNet

Avner Ash is professor of mathematics at Boston College and the coauthor of Smooth Compactification of Locally Symmetric Varieties. Robert Gross is associate professor of mathematics at Boston College.